Hello, everyone!
Today’s Word of the week is once more a twofer, this time to show you another singular feature of the EP-BP continuum of differences: how Brazilian Portuguese adds an r to some words after st-.
The two words I chose for the feature are [o] registo (registry, registering, register) and [o] rasto (track, trail, trace [of someone or something], which in BP and some dialects of EP become [o] registro and [o] rastro. To be fair, it’s EP who seems to be doing some dropping instead of BP doing some adding, since the Latin cognates registrum (“register”) and rastrum (rake) have the r; this indicates that BP, having its origins in an earlier form of Portuguese, kept a consonant that was lost in EP.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that all words with -st[]o never take an -r in EP (Portuguese is always much more complicated than that); we also have [o] mastro (mast, flagpole), [o] claustro (cloister), [o] maestro (conductor, of an orchestra), [o] lastro (ballast, of a ship), [o] astro (celestial body), and [o] lustro (polish), just to name a few.
