The Latin Legacy 345
conversation The phonetic differences between Spanish and Portu-
guese are sharp The outstanding ones are summarized below
(i) Like French^ Portuguese has nasalized vowels, and even (unlike
French) nasalized diphthongs Nasalization has come about when a
vowel preceded moxn These two consonants may be silent, or may have
disappeared in writing The til (~) over the nasal vowel is then the tomb-
stone of one or other, as the French * weeps over a departed s, e g
Spanish lana (wool), Portuguese la, Spanish son (are), Portuguese
sao'y Spanish cnstiano (Christian), Portuguese cnstao, Spanish pan
(bread), Portuguese pao, Spanish buen (good), Portuguese bom, Spanish
fin (end), Portuguese fim
(u) Between vowels Portuguese suppresses the Latin /, e g Latin
caelwn (sky), Spanish aelo, Portuguese ceu, Latin salute (health),
Spanish salud, Portuguese satide, Latin volare (fly), Spanish volar, Portu-
guese voar The loss of / extends to the definite article and the corre-
sponding unstressed pronouns of the third person, i e o and a, os, and as,
for what were once lo and la, los and las Thus o porto = the port
Through agglutination of the article with the preposition de or ad, we
get do and da, dos and das, or ao and d, aos and as, which recall the French
forms du, des, or au, aux
(ui) The initial Vulgar Latin d, fl, pi, which often becomes II in
Spanish, change to the ch (as in champagne) of Portuguese, e g Spanish
Have (key), lleno (full), llama (flame), Portuguese chave, cheio, chama
(French clef, plein, flamme) On this account the equivalence of one
small group of words is impossible to detect without a knowledge of
sound-shifts
(iv) The initial Vulgar Latin/which often degenerates to a silent h in
Spanish remains in Portuguese, e g Portuguese filho (son), Spanish hzjo
(v) While Portuguese stressed vowels o and e are conservative, they
are replaced in Spanish by die diphthongs ue and ie3 e g Portuguese
perna (leg), nove (nine), porta (door)5 Spanish pierna, nueve, puerta
(vi) Portuguese orthography shares with French the accents ^ ,',*,•>
The acute accent labels as such an open and stressed vowel, the circum-
flex a closed and stressed one, e g pd, powder (Spanish polvo), pdr, put
(Spanish poner)
Grammatical differences between the two dialects are trifling Por-
tuguese discarded haver (Spanish haber) as a helper verb at an early
date As such it persists only in set expressions Its modern equivalent
is ter (Spanish tener) Hence tenho amado (I have loved), tenho chegado
(I have arrived), for the Spanish he amado and he ttegado Both
languages favour diminutives The Spanish favourite is -ito, the Portu-
guese -mho In one way Portuguese still lingers behind modern Spanish,
French, or Italian The agglutination of the infinitive with habere to
form the future and the conditional is incomplete In an affirmative