this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
403 points (99.5% liked)
Funny
14569 readers
84 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was going to say, if Portuguese is like Spanish, it's "anus" without the tilde over the n, right?
Portuguese doesn’t really have a tilde, but that’s what the h following an n (or an L) is there to indicate
It does have a tilde but it's mostly used over vowels, to represent nasalisation; e.g.
For /ɲ/ (the phoneme written "ñ" in Spanish) it's as you said, though: it's spelled "nh" instead.
For that pair of words (ES año vs. PT ano) this works, but note the correspondence gets really messy, it depends on the etymology of the word. A quick run-down would be:
Then for Latin intervocalic /n/ Spanish simply keeps it. Portuguese initially converts it into vowel nasalisation, but then changes it further on, it's a bit messy:
For ES "ano" anus and PT "ânus" anus this doesn't work, though. Portuguese didn't inherit the word, but reborrowed it. And perhaps to avoid making it sound like "ano" (year), kept the Latin nominative ending. (If the word was inherited it would end as *ão or something like this.)