Talk:acordos

The vowel of the plural

Now, i have been having some discussions about portuguese phonology on wikipedia, the main reason for that is that the "official" description of the portuguese language phonology made by professional linguists seems rather faulty to me, one glaring example is their insistence in using the semivowels /w/ and /j/ to describe asyllabic vowels, which are different things. All this to say that the discussion around how the plural of this word should be pronounced is a perfect example to illustrate the incompetence of (most) portuguese linguists. Every website you'll visit, every linguist you see on tv will argue that the correct pronunciation is with a closed "o", contrary to our natural instict. They usualy provide no evidence as to why, or, for instance, one that i read said it's because 'acordo' is a back-formation from 'acordar' where the vowel 'o' is pronounced 'u'. Well that makes fucking sense!

All you have to do is compare it to spanish, where they have 'acuerdo' which, if you know the barely basic of the history of the two languages, know that it came from a Latin short 'o', which in portuguese becomes closed in the masc. sing., but open in the other declinations. We have plenty of examples of that pattern: spanish puerco, muerto, grueso, just to name a few, correspond to portuguese porco, morto, grosso, all having a closed 'o' that becomes open in the feminine and plural. So yeah, the plural of 'acôrdo' is 'acórdos', as i just proved scientificaly, so forgive me if i sound a bit arrogant when discussing portuguese fonology for being able to do the most basic of rational exercises, which most portuguese linguists apparently can't. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 21:50, 15 August 2024 (UTC)