Registration request for new subtags for Portuguese orthographies

cowan at ccil.org cowan at ccil.org
Tue Mar 24 14:48:37 CET 2015


Martin J. Duerst scripsit:


> A completely different way to see this is to look at the 1990 accord as
> acknowledging the variety of Portuguese (my guess is that the spelling
> difference e.g. between  'fato' and 'facto' results from an
> underlying pronunciation difference).

Quoth the Pfft:

There is a variation in the pronunciation of the first consonant of
certain clusters, most commonly C or P in cç, ct, pç and pt. These
consonants may be variably elided or conserved. For some words, this
variation may exist inside a country, sometimes in all of them; for
others, the variation is dialectal, with the consonant being always
pronounced in one country and always ellided in the other. This variation
affects 0,5% of the language's vocabulary, or 575 words out of 110,000.

In most cases, Brazilians variably conserve the consonant while speakers
elsewhere have invariably ceased to pronounce it (for example, dete(c)tor
in Brazil versus detetor in Portugal). The inverse situation is rarer,
occurring in words such as fa(c)to and conta(c)to (consonants never
pronounced in Brazil, pronounced elsewhere). Until 2009, this reality
could not be apprehended from the spelling: while Brazilians did not write
consonants that were no longer pronounced, the spelling of the other
countries retained them in many words as silent letters, usually when
there was still a vestige of their presence in the pronunciation of the
preceding vowel. This could give the false impression that European
Portuguese was phonologically more conservative in this aspect, when in
fact it was Brazilian Portuguese that retained more consonants in
pronunciation.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Values of beeta will give rise to dom!
(5th/6th edition 'mv' said this if you tried to rename '.' or
'..' entries; see http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html)




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