The grammar of the Portuguese language is a very interesting object of study! We are speakers, we dominate the language and yet we do not know all the curiosities of the Portuguese language. But, rest assured, when it comes to learning, know that it is built throughout our lives, don't think you'll ever understand our grammar.
Among the various curiosities that inhabit our language, there is a call metaplasm. When a word in the Portuguese language undergoes any alteration in its structure, whether by suppression, addition or change, we say that it has undergone a metaplasm. This is because the Portuguese language is undergoing constant historical evolution — if we had the opportunity to make a time travel and going back to the 19th century, we would certainly be surprised by all the changes by which the language passed on. There were so many that we would be lost and even find it difficult to understand a strange language that, incredibly, we call ours!
There is a type of metaplasm that happens by suppression called
Apocope, which is nothing more than the elimination of a sound element at the end of the word. This happened because the words, when they changed from the Latin language to the Portuguese language, underwent important changes. Note the examples of apocalypse:suitcase → mother → bad
Sea → sea
Amat → love
male → evil
a lot → a lot
Cinématographe → cinema → cinema
A very common occurrence in Brazilian Portuguese is the suppression of the consonant /r/ at the end of words, especially in cases where the verb is in the infinitive mode. Look at the examples:
speech instead of speechr
do instead of dor
I left instead of leavingr
dance instead of dancingr
It is not a question of right or wrong, but of observing and understanding the evolution of language and the difference between written and spoken language.
By Luana Castro
Graduated in Letters