PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE. One of the Romance languages, or modern descendants of Latin. spoken in Portugal, Brazil, the Spanish Province of Galicia (with archaic and dialectal elements), the Cape Verde Islands, Portuguese Guinea, and other Portuguese colonies. As in the case of the sister languages, Spanish, French, Italian, etc., Portuguese is derived from the popular Latin of the Roman soldiery and colo nists rather than from the classic speech of Rome. In its form it resembles the Spanish, its nearest neighbor, more than it does any one of the other Romance tongues. Its literature is much less im portant than that of the French, Spanish, or Italian, because it has been too largely imitative and too frequently subordinated to influences from France and Spain, and only exceptionally original in tone and content. Even the Portu guese vocabulary betrays considerable borrowing from France.
A description of the phonological conditions of the language is made somewhat difficult by the fact that the alphabetical notation is not strictly accurate from the phonetic point of view, since one and the same letter may denote different sounds. Moreover. even the most competent ob servers differ in their account of the various vowel and consonant elements of the speech. Ac cording to the best estimate, there seem to be eleven vowel sounds, at least, viz. three values of a, one rather close, like the a of father, a sec ond quite open. like the a of malt, and a third, slurred and indistinct in nature. but akin to the of around; three e sounds, one close, another open, and a third (written c or i) indistinct in value and not unlike the French so-called mute or the sound of n in fur; two i's, one like the i of bit and the other like the i of ravine, this latter value being represented by the vocalic y and by e, as well as by i; two o sounds, an open and a close: and a u sound (denoted by u and o), approximate to the u of flute. These are all oral von'els. There occur also nasalized forms of five of them, viz. a nasalized a (written a, an, or am), a nasalized close c (written cm or en), a nasal ized i (written in) or in), a nasalized closed o (written 6, oar, o»), and a nasalized u (written um ur On). Portuguese has a number of diph thongs. Several of these latter may also be nasalized: but the process of nasalization is not so complete in the ease of either the vowel: or the diphthongs as it is in French, for some trace of the nasalizing consonant (In, a) seems to persist (with a velar quality). The investiga tions of expert phoneticians like Vianna show the existence of no fewer than twenty-five consonan tal sounds in the language. These are: p. b, a
bilabial b, f, r, u', (denoted by u or o in hiatus) ; t, d, a spirant d ((I pronounced like th in the), I. a palatalized I (written 1h and pronounced ap proximately like the li of filial), a guttural 1, n, a palatalized n (written nh and pronounced not unlike the ni of onion), a velar a (that is. the no sound which ordinarily follows a preceding nasalized vowel) : tongue-trilled r and rr (writ ten r, rr, and HO' the latter a reinforced form of the former and both carefully pronounced: the silibants s (having the value of the En glish ss, and written s, ss, c before e or i, c before other vowels and occasionally .c). z (pro nounced like the English and written a or 51. g (the phonetic notation for the English sir sound. represented in Portuguese by ch. r, s, z), and 5 (the phonetic notation for the sibilant sound heard in the English azure and represented in Portuguese by j. g before e or i, s, and z) ; y (that is i or e with a consonantal value easily acquired in hiatus) ; k (the English k sound, denoted in Portuguese by c before a, o, u, by q before tea, by pa before c or i, by eh in a few learned words, and by P in some foreign words): and finally g (that is the sound in the English go, denoted by q before a, o, or u and by go before e or i). Of the consonants d, t, n. 1, it should be remarked that their dental character is more pro nounced than in English, as in the formation of them the tongue tends to touch the base of the upper teeth. The linking together in utterance of syntactically related words in a sentence ac counts for the variations in value of certain con sonants: it does -o particularly in the ease of the sibilants s and z. One of the most marked features of the Portuguese as compared with other Romance languages is the loss of intervo calic / and a thus guars represents the Latin voiles and pessoa the Latin persona. The forms of the article o, a, "the," are due to the intervo ealic position of the / in such syntactieal com binations as de-lo, de-la, `of the.' whence have resulted the forms do and do, and by a re-division of the compound d'o and (Pa. In common with Spanish, but probably to a greater degree, Portu guese shows an interchange of I, r, and a. A metathesis of vowels, consonants, and even whole syllables of the Latin etymon is not infrequent in the language. As a result of linking or sentence phonetics, contiguous vowels of different words in a sentence are often pronounced in a single syllable; thus todu a armada becomes in rapid speech todarmada.