Word of the Day

Sunday, January 21, 2007

French-borrowed words in Portuguese and Spanish

Traditional we have kept the same French gender (masculine - le, feminine - la) in words that Portuguese has borrowed from that tongue and, if the word is masculine, we change the final French e to o and if the word is feminine, we change it to a. But recently it has been a trend to keep the same ending in Brazilian Portuguese (at least), which means keeping the French e with the original gender. We have thus words such as a cabine (from la cabine), much more common than the more Portuguese a cabina and a equipe. It is interesting to note, however, that this word has followed its traditional path in Portugal, where it is a equipa. It should be the same in Brazil, but for some reason, it is not. It seems as though traditions are being more and more ignored nowadays, as can be seen in suinocultura. I wonder if that's something positive or negative.

On another note, Spanish has followed a weird path for l'équipe (feminine) and transformed it into el equipo. It should have become la equipa. I guess fewer and fewer people nowadays have a smattering of French and just assign whatever gender they please to new words taken from French or associate them with similar concepts and give them the same gender. That could be an explanation.

No comments: