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Portugal and Finland are practically at the opposite corners of Europe. This may be one reason why I am now obsessed about Portuguese. -- I might start studying it, but frankly, it is a difficult language, way more difficult than Spanish.

What makes it so difficult?

What about counting in Portuguese for a while? (I?m baffled so many people knew how to do it in Finnish in the other thread.)

Menos um.

EDIT ? Tpyo.

Last edited by Spiderpig on 28 Aug 2014, 4:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Krabo, I know someone studying portuguese. She said that knowing Spanish and French is a huge help. I don't recall you mentioning that you spoke either of those though.

Spiderpig, my counting and Krabo's was legitimate, I suspect most other people were using 'Google Translate'. Almost no-one learns Finnish. Just Finns and crazy people.

not even the Sami?

I was kind of counting them as Finns.

that's what i was guessing.
i can comprehend good chunk of written Portuguese since i know Spanish, but spoken is a completely different story.
some words look like Spanish word with a final -n replaced with -m.

Knowing English, Spanish and Portuguese is a great help to understand not just written French, but more or less any written Romance language other than Romanian. I suspect you have to learn French to get a feel of how profoundly Gallicized English is, though German probably helps, too, by showing the other side of the coin (what a by-no-means-so-extremely-Latinized Germanic language looks like).

Spanish -n usually corresponds to Portuguese -m, except when preceded by a stressed a or o; in the latter case, you get the idiosyncratically Portuguese endings -ão (capitán, capitão; salón, salão) and -ã (afán, afã). Just as in the Spanish letter ñ, the tilde was originally a small n (or possibly an m) on top of the other letter. Only by historical accident were the characters ã and õ preserved, while ẽ, ĩ and ũ were replaced by em (trem, Spanish tren), im (fim, Spanish fin) and um (algum, Spanish algún or alguno) at the end of words, and by en, in and un in other places (such as in the plurals of those same words: trens, fins and alguns).

Note this final m is never pronounced like the one in Spanish manzana (Portuguese maçã). The letter choice between n and m isn?t strictly motivated by phonetics in a syllable-final position, either in Spanish or in Portuguese, because only one nasal sound is natural there (loanwords, including Latinisms like referéndum, can stretch this a bit, but that?s all). In Spanish, n may have been chosen because, in many dialects (notably in Madrid, Spain), this sound is alveolar (like the n- in nariz) when followed by a vowel or a pause (otherwise, it?s dictated by the following consonant). In other dialects, however, it?s velar, like the final consonant of English sing. This criterion doesn?t work in Portuguese, because there?s no such syllable-final alveolar nasal consonant. The velar one exists dialectally, and I think it was more common in the past, but the current international standard is to pronounce those endings with nasal vowels or diphthongs as the only trace of the former consonant. In short, an m is just as good as an n or a tilde for representing them.

If you want to polish a bit more your recognition of Portuguese cognates to Spanish words, bear in mind that Latin single -n- and -l- between vowels, preserved in Spanish (and, as far as I know, in every other Romance language), were dropped in Portuguese, so you have moeda and saída for Spanish moneda and salida. In many cases, you?ll find an -i- in the place of the lost consonant (sereia, teia vs Spanish sirena, tela), but this is because of a general tendency to break hiatuses when the first vowel is stressed (passeio, correio vs Spanish paseo, correo). Latin double consonants -nn- and -ll-, which became the Spanish consonants -ñ- and -ll-, were instead reduced to single -n- and -l- in Portuguese: ano, selo vs Spanish año, sello.

Part of the reason these consonants are spelled differently (nh and lh instead of ñ and ll) in Portuguese is because they originated from different Latin sounds. Many Portuguese -nh-s correspond to Spanish -n-s (espinha, Spanish espina), and many -lh-s, to Spanish soft -g-s or -j-s (colher, olho vs Spanish coger, ojo). Of course, many others do coïncide with Spanish -ñ- and -ll-: aranha, falhar vs Spanish araña, fallar.

there we go.
thanks Spiderpig for these interesting tidbits of information.
i just might use some of these concepts when i'm developing 'daughters' from a proto-language ill work on.

Now that sounds cool

I knew someone would show up and start elaborating on Portuguese. I just knew.

I know nothing.

Eu não sei nada.

Pagh vISov.

Yes, that's what I meant.

Huh?

(Don't think I didn't recognise your Portuguese there).


En tiedä mitään

Zero.

(That?s Portuguese, not English )