Synchronic vs diachronic approaches in the descriptions of german nominal inflection in the earliest Portuguese textbooks of the german language (1863-1926)

Since the first German language textbook for a Portuguese target audience was published in 1863, the respective authors had to ask themselves not only how to designate the components of the nominal inflection of German nouns, but also how to present them in a classificatory way in order to familiarize their audience with the German declension. Given that the Grimmian diachronic approach was and still is considered authoritative in academic German studies, the question arises as to whether and how the authors of the earliest Portuguese works were guided by this or other approaches. The result will answer the final question of which of the classification approaches might be particularly promising in the context of German as a foreign language.