Word of the Day

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Portuguese spelling reforms

It would be easier for foreign learners of Portuguese if the circumflex accent in words like almôço (lunch, noun) and êle (he, pronoun) had been kept to differentiate their closed vowel pronunciations from almoço (I have lunch, verb) and ele (the letter L), with their open vowels. It would also be easier for said students if we still differentiated in the spelling que, qui and gue, gui from qüe, qüi, güe and güi, so once they saw a new word with those combinations they would immediately know whether the u is pronounced or not. Too late now! Now this poor teacher has to deal with the quizzical looks of his students as to why our spelling can sometimes be so chaotic. Didn't we have enough problems with x already?

A related post here.

1 comment:

Klaus said...

Concordo com você. Gostaria de que algumas particularidades da escrita "antiga" do português tivessem sido mantidas, como o acento diferencial de timbre aberto/fechado. Quanto a essa nova reforma, que aboliu o trema, nem se fala... Pra mim, é como se não tivesse acontecido, prefiro esquecê-la.