SC - Re: bacalao

[Vincent Cuenca]

>Interesting recipe, as the word "Bacalao" is a Porteguese word,
>and not Spanish.  The Spanish word (if they have one related for
>Salt Cod) would probably end in "an" instead of "ao"  as in
>"S~ao Paulo" as opposed to "San Paulo".
>
>Not that I am a language scholar, I just lived in Brasil for a
>couple of years.  And besides, what I learned there about
>Porteguese cooking, this recipe closely resembles some that I
>encountered in Brasil, but without the peppers.
>
>Tyrca

Actually, the word is Spanish.  A variant Portuguese spelling is "bacalhau". 
  The two languages are closely related; there's a dialect called Galego 
spoken in the northwestern province of Galicia, which is sort of halfway 
between Portuguese and Castilian.  The "~ao" construction in Portuguese is a 
contraction of "santo", derived from "sanctus" or "holy".  The "t" dropped 
off, and the "n" was adapted into a tilde, which was a common abbreviation 
for the letter n.  The "n" sound is still there, albeit faintly.  Sort of an 
"ng" sound.  The same thing happened in Spanish with the "ñ"; the sound 
expressed by that symbol was originally written as "nn", until the scribes 
got tired of writing out both letters over and over.

Vicente
(walking compendium of useless and occasuionally apocryphal knowledge)
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