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: A , B , C , D , E , F , G , H , I , J , L , M , N , O , P , Q , R , S , T , U , V , X , Z Although not found in vernacular terms, the letters K , W , and Y are still used for proper names and Portuguese words derived from them. Portuguese also uses several digraphs and diacritics, described below. INTRODUCTION The history of the Portuguese script began in the 12th Century , when scribes in the Western Iberian Peninsula started using the local vernacular in documents, in place of Latin. The script evolved naturally until the close of the 19th Century , the golden age of Portuguese literature. At about that time the national ''Academias de Letras'' ("Literary Academies") were created in Brazil and Portugal, and legally empowered to standardize orthography. Today, Portuguese Orthography is defined by national laws and international treaties, which are binding for most administrative and educational uses. The orthography underwent a major reform around 1940 , when a large fraction of the words had their spelling radically simplified. A second reform around 1990 had much smaller impact. The general result of those reforms was to make Portuguese orthography — which until 1940s has been determined chiefly by Etymology — much closer to a Phonetic writing system. However, its rules are still rather complex and non-algorithmic, and still somewhat based on etymology. Thus, spelling and pronunciation are still partly determined by tradition, on a word by word basis. The same letter may have two or more phonetic values ("X" has four), and the same sound can be written in more than one way, all depending on the word. Two conspicuous examples of this variability are the letter "S", which may be pronounced as in English "sun" or as in "'''z'''ero", depending on its context; and the letters "C" and "G", which are pronounced as in "set" or "vi'''si'''on" before "E" and "I", and as "'''c'''at" and "'''g'''et", in most other contexts. DIGRAPHS AND TRIGRAPHS Portuguese orthography uses several character combinations to represent additional phonemes:
The combinations "CH", "LH", and "NH" were a Mediaeval influence of Occitan . The digraphs "QU", "RR", "SC", "SS", "XC" and "XS" were inherited from Latin spelling (possibly with some sound changes). The "ZZ" digraph is used in only one Portuguese word, '' Pizza '', and its vernacular derivatives ''pizzaria'' ("pizza parlor"; Italian ''pizzeria'') and ''pizzeiro'' ("pizza maker"; Italian ''pizzaiolo''). (The persistence of the {Link without Title} pronunciation and the "ZZ" spelling is intriguing. Italian words generally had "ZZ" replaced by "SS", "Ç", or "Z" when borrowed into Portuguese; but while the variant ''piza'' has been occasionally used in Portugal, it did not catch, and ''pizza'' is essentially the only form used.) The "TCH" trigraph is used in only a few words, such as ''tchau'' ("goodbye", from Italian '' Ciao ''), ''atchim'' and ''tchibum'' (common Onomatopoeia s for Sneeze and splash, respectively), ''tchê'' (a Southern Brazilian informal prefix for proper names, from Argentinian Spanish '' Che ''), and ''tcheco'' (" Czech "). However, the last one is also spelled ''checo'', especially in Portugal. The "TX" is used in Brazil in indigenous names as ''Txapakúra'' and ''Txukahamãe''. Each of these polygraphs is decomposed into its constituent letters for the purpose of . DIACRITICS Portuguese also uses Diacritic s — Acute , Circumflex , Tilde , Grave , Diaeresis , and Cedilla — on some letters: Acute and circumflex accents The diacritics "acute accent" (''acento agudo'') and "circumflex accent" (''acento circunflexo'') are used primarily to indicate the Stress ed Syllable of a word. The stress diacritic is either written or omitted according to detailed rules that depend primarily on the position of that syllable (first, second, or third from the end) and on the final letter of the word. The rules are such that the stress of an un-accented written word can (almost) always be deduced through them, even if the word was never heard before. When the stress diacritic (acute or circumflex) is present, it also indicates the vowel's Quality : namely, "Á", "É", and "Ó" have the so-called "open" sounds /a/, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/; whereas "Â", "Ê", "Ô" have the "closed" sounds /ɐ/, /e/ and /o/. When the vowels "A", "E", "O" carry no diacritics, their sound may be either open or closed, and this attribute cannot always be deduced from the printed word. Thus, for example, ''seco'' can be either an adjective ("dry") or a verb ("I dry"); the "E" is "closed" in the first case, and "open" in the second. The unmarked vowels "I" and "U" have only one possible sound each (/i/ and /u/), so they may take only the acute accent. In a few written words, the acute accent is traditionally used even when the letter in question is part of a nasal dipthong: ''também'' ("also"), ''porém'' ("however"), ''ninguém'' ("nobody"). Those words rhyme with "mãe" ("mother") in Portugal, but in Brazil ''ém'' is pronounced as the nasal diphthong /ẽj/. Only Galician speakers pronounce the final "m". These two accents are also used to distinguish in print the members of certain homophonous word pairs: ''para'' ("for", "to") and ''pára'' ("it stops"), ''por'' ("by", "through") and ''pôr'' ("to put"), ''tem'' ("it has") and ''têm'' ("they have"), etc... Tilde The Tilde (''til'') is used over the vowels "A" and "O" to indicate Nasal ized vowel sounds. The accented letters "Ã" and "Õ" are a unique feature of Portuguese among Romance languages (although French also has the corresponding nasal sounds). The tilde is only used in these cases: ''ã'', ''ãe'', ''ãi'', ''ão'', ''õe''. Unlike the acute and circumflex accents, the tilde does not necessarily indicate stress, and indeed a few words carry both a tilde and a stress diacritic, e.g. ''ímã'' ("magnet") and ''órgão'' ("organ"). Historically, the nasalized vowel sounds derive from vowel + "N" groups in the parent Latin words, e.g. ''mão'' ("hand") from Latin ''mano''. The tilde sign originates from the Medieval scribal convention of writing the Contracting letter "N" over the preceding vowel. Unlike Spanish and Galician , however, Portuguese does not use tilde over "N" (" Ñ "). The corresponding sound is represented by "NH": one writes ''senhor'' ("mister", "lord"), not ''señor''. Grave accent The grave accent diacritic (''acento grave'') is presently used only over a word-initial "A", to indicate the presence of a Contracted Preposition ''a'' ("to", "for", etc.) This grave-marked contraction occurs with only a handful of words, chiefly the article ''a'' and the various forms of the pronoun ''aquele'' ("that"). Thus, ''a'' ("to") + ''a'' ("the") = ''à'' ("to the"); ''a'' + ''aquela'' = ''àquela'' ("to that"); and so on. In all these cases the "À" sounds exactly like "Á". Until about 1971 in Brazil and probably 1945 in Portugal , the grave accent also replaced the acute accent to indicate the secondary (stem) stress in adverbs formed with the suffix ''-mente'', e.g. ''hábil'' ("deft") + ''-mente'' = ''hàbilmente'' ("deftly"). Circumflex accents on the stem were retained, e.g. ''sôfrego'' ("eager") + ''-mente'' = ''sôfregamente'' ("eagerly"). All the ''-mente'' adverbs are now written without any stress diacritic or vowel quality indication, e.g. ''habilmente'', ''sofregamente''. Diaeresis The diaeresis (in Portuguese, ''trema'') may be used only over the U in the combinations ''gue'', ''gui'', ''que'' and ''qui''. These are pronounced The diaeresis is only used in Brazil, and increasingly omitted (some newspapers and many people don't use it). It existed in the European orthography until 1945, when a spelling reform abolished it because there were a few cases where its use differed in Portugal and Brazil. The diaeresis does not indicate stress, and indeed a word may contain other diacritics — such as ''argüição'' ("questioning"), or ''qüinqüelíngüe'' ("in five languages", conjectured to be the Portuguese word with most diacritics). Before 1971, the diaeresis could be used in poetry, to indicate that dipthongs ending in "U" should be broken into separate vowels, for Scansion purposes. Thus '' Saudade '', which is normally read as three syllables (''sau-da-de''), could be written ''saüdade'' to indicate a four-syllable reading (''sa-u-da-de''). Cedilla The cedilla (''cedilha'') is used only under the letter "C", only before "A", "O", or "U", and never at the beginning or at the end of a word: ''poça'' ("puddle"), ''moço'' ("lad"), ''açúcar'' ("sugar"). The combination "Ç" always sounds as in "sun", even in contexts where the letter "S" would sound . (Originally the cedilla was a small "Z" or "S" written under the "C".) Nowadays the cedilha is used in words of latin origin (replacing the 't': "natione"->"nação") or arab origin ("alcaçuz" {Link without Title} , for instance). The combinations "Ç" and "SS" are therefore phonetically equivalent, and only tradition determines which of them is correct in a given word. Indeed, writing one for the other is perhaps the most common kind of spelling error made by native speakers. Incidentally, several Homophonic pairs or words are distinguished only by the use of "Ç" or "SS" in writing: ''paço'' ("palace") and ''passo'' ("step"), ''ruço'' ("red-haired") and ''russo'' ("Russian"), ''seção'' ("section") and ''sessão'' ("session"), etc. OTHER SYMBOLS Apostrophe The apostrophe (') appears as part of certain phrases, usually to indicate the loss of a vowel in the contraction of a preposition with the word that follows it: ''de'' + ''amigo'' = ''d'amigo''. Its use is almost exclusively literary. Hyphen The hyphen (-) is used to make compound words, especially animal names like ''papagaio-de-rabo-vermelho'' (" Red-tailed Parrot "). It is also extensively used to append weak pronouns to the verb, as in ''quero-o'' ("I want it"), or even to embed them inside the verb, as in ''levaria'' + ''te'' + ''os'' = ''levar-tos-ia'' ("I would take them to you"). PORTUGUESE-LANGUAGE TYPEWRITERS Typewriters in Portuguese-speaking countries generally have a separate extra key for "Ç", and a Dead Key for each diacritic except the cedilla; so that "Á" is obtained by typing first the acute accent, then the letter "A". BRAZILIAN VS. PORTUGUESE ORTHOGRAPHY There are significant and pervasive differences between the spoken dialects of Brazil and Portugal, as well as within each country. The main difference is a general switch from acute accents in Portugal (''sinónimo'') to circumflexes in Brazil (''sinônimo''), reflecting a switch in pronunciation, from "open" to "closed" vowels. Another important difference is that Brazilian spelling often omits a "P" or "C" that comes before another consonant other than "L" or "R", such as ''ótimo'' ("optimum", in Brazil) vs. ''óptimo'' (Portugal), or ''fato'' ("fact") vs. ''facto''. Some of these spelling differences are reflected in the pronunciation of those words. STATUS OF K, W, Y The letter "Y" was never used consistently in medieval Portuguese. During the Renaissance, some authors reintroduced it in words of Latin or Greek origin, for Etymology , or as a semivowel in falling diphthongs, like in Spanish. The Portuguese spelling reform of 1911, and the later spelling convention signed between Portugal and Brazil in 1943, however, abolished etymological spellings and decreed that the semivowel "y" should be written "i", since it is an allophone of the vowel /i/. The letters "K" and "W" were always uncommon in Portuguese spelling, although they appeared occasionally in some proper nouns. Nevertheless, their use is allowed in vernacular hybrid words derived from foreign names, such as ''keynesiano'' and ''newtoniano'', listed even in the most authoritative Portuguese dictionaries. They are sorted as in the English alphabet, namely "K" before "L", "W" before "X", and "Y" before "Z". SPELLING OF PROPER NAMES Family names are exempt from the above restrictions. Thus, a foreigner who emigrates to a Portuguese speaking country and whose family name contains "K", "W" or "Y" does not have to change it. In Brazil, these letters are also widely accepted for given names, in all official records and documents. In fact, those three letters are quite popular in made-up first and middle names, such as ''Waldirci'' and ''Deyvide'', or in the names of Japanese -Brazilians, such as ''Satiko'' and ''Yojiro''. Family names have often retained their pre- 1940 spellings — in particular the final "Y" was retained in many names of Native (chefly Tupi-Guarani ) origin, such as ''Guaracy''. However, the use of diacritics in personal names is generally restricted to the letter-diacritic combinations above, and often also by the applicable Portuguese spelling rules. So, for example, a Brazilian birth registrar may accept ''Niccoló'', ''Schwartz'', or ''Agüeiro''; but he is likely to object to ''Niccolò'', ''Nuñez'', ''Molière'', or ''Gödel'', and possibly even to ''Çambel'' or ''Qadi''. Portugal is more restrictive than Brazilin this regard. Given names must be of Roman, Jewish (Biblical), or Arabic origin, taken from a list fixed by law. However, in the wake of increased immigration (especially from Eastern European countries), a regime of exception has been instituted for immigrants. The main reason given by Portuguese authorities to justify these restrictions is that an unusual name may lead to discrimination in school by other children, a thesis that was backed by some psychological studies. LETTER NAMES The Portuguese names for the Latin letters are: A ''á'', B ''bê'', C ''cê'', D ''dê'', E ''é'' or ''ê'', F ''efe'', G ''gê'' or ''guê'', H ''agá'', I ''i'', J ''jota'', L ''ele'' or ''lê'', M ''eme'' or ''mê'', N ''ene'' or ''nê'', O ''ó'', P ''pê'', Q ''quê'', R ''erre'', S ''esse'', T ''tê'', U ''u'', V ''vê'', X ''xis'', Z ''zê''. In the names of F, L, R, S, the initial ''e'' is pronounced not [e , so the names of the letters L, S and the pronouns ''ele'' ("he") and ''esse'' ("that") are not homophones. The names of the extra letters are: :"K": ''cá'' in Brazil, ''capa'' in Portugal; :"W": ''dáblio'' / ''double u'' (the English name) in Brazil and Portugal, or ''duplo vê'' in Portugal; :"Y": ''ípsilon'', ''ípsilo'' or ''i grego'' in Brazil and Portugal; also ''ipsilão'' or ''ipsilone'' in Brazil. SEE ALSO |
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