Antônio Lemos Barbosa was born on 15 September 1910, in
Três Corações, Minas Gerais, being the second of four children. His father, Luís Ferreira Barbosa, was a teacher at the house of his grandfather; there, Luís met Júlia Lemos Barbosa (), who died when Barbosa was 11 years old, during the birth of the couple's fifth child, who also died. Barbosa took a humanities course at then
Jesuit-led
Diocesan Seminary of
Campanha. He pursued studies for seven years, from 1927 to 1934, at the
Gregorian University in Rome, where he earned
doctoral degrees in Philosophy and Theology and a bachelor's degree in
canon law. He was
ordained priest by
Marchetti Selvaggiani on 25 July 1934. Barbosa celebrated his first
Low Mass in the
Catacombs of Domitilla, and his first
High Mass at the . He also took a
linguistics course at the
Biblical Institute. Barbosa served as professor of
Ethnography and
Indigenous Languages (specifically
Old Tupi) at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). In 1956, after more than ten years of work, he published the book (), which received favorable reviews from contemporary critics. , for instance, declared the work constituted a "didactic revolution".
Aryon Rodrigues considered it as being based on a conservative analysis, but "for that very reason" quite accessible to the non-specialist reader. Barbosa's book has also been called "the most complete and perfect grammar of the Tupi language". It is considered that the work contains "interesting insights", but also that one of its weaknesses lies in the made-up, non-attested examples; it is deemed more reasonable that the description of a
dead language contains only
attested examples. Starting in the 1950s, in 1951 and 1970, Barbosa published two short Old Tupi
vocabularies, while acknowledging the need to publish a
dictionary of that language. In 1986, Rodrigues considered them the only reliable Old Tupi dictionaries available on the market; in 2013,
Eduardo de Almeida Navarro said they were the only serious and reliable works that had existed in the genre. Barbosa assisted in the reconstruction of the , whose was located where the
Fort Copacabana is today, dedicating himself to it from 1947 until his death in 1970 and lefting two properties for its construction. For it, he also received the support of Brazil's then first lady, , as well as other contemporary figures, such as
Eurico Gaspar Dutra,
Eduardo Gomes, , and
Juarez Távora. In 1954, Barbosa became its rector. After his death,
Eduardo Koaik was appointed to lead it.
Death Barbosa died on 5 September 1970, after being hospitalized for two months at . His death is regarded as premature for having prevented him from fulfilling his wish to write an Old Tupi dictionary similar to
Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's
Tesoro de la lengua guaraní. == Works ==