Germanic and Asian Contributions

On the solid core it inherited from Latin, Portuguese went on accumulating loanwords from many sources. Two of those layers, separated by a thousand years and by half the globe, left unmistakable marks: the Germanic words, fixed in Late Antiquity by the peoples who settled in the Peninsula, and the Asian words, brought back from Asia by the ships of the expansion. They are modest contributions in number, but they reveal the history the language has passed through.

The Germanic superstratum

When the Western Roman Empire fell apart in the 5th century, Germanic peoples occupied Hispania. In the north-west — the future Gallaecia — the Suevic kingdom took hold (409–585); the Visigothic dominion later extended over the whole Peninsula. These peoples eventually adopted the spoken Latin of the populations they ruled, but left in it a set of words: this is what is called a superstratum, the trace of one language laid over another without replacing it.

Much of this vocabulary belongs to the spheres of war, law and lordly life — not by chance, the fields in which the Germanic aristocracy was dominant. Many of these words did not, however, reach Portuguese directly through the Sueves and Visigoths: they had already entered the common Latin of the Empire, shared with the other Romance languages, or arrived later through Frankish, by way of Provençal and French.

One phonetic clue gives many of these loans away: Germanic w-, alien to Latin, was adapted as gu-, yielding guerra, guardar, guiar [ɡiˈaɾ] and guarnecer. The suffix -engo (realengo, mulherengo, solarengo) is likewise of Germanic origin.

Names and place names

The most visible Gothic legacy lies not in the common vocabulary but in personal names. A large part of traditional Portuguese onomastics is of Visigothic origin: Fernando, Afonso, Rodrigo, Álvaro, Gonçalo, Elvira. From the genitives of these names came many patronymic surnames (Fernandes, Rodrigues, Gonçalves) and countless place names, above all in the North and in Galicia, formed from a Germanic owner’s name: Gondomar (from Gundemarus), Guimarães (from Vímara), Resende, Sandim.

The age of expansion: the Asian words

The second great layer arrives at the opposite end of the story. From Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India (1498) onward, the Portuguese settled along the trade routes of the Indian and Pacific oceans — Goa, Malacca, Macau, Nagasaki — and became, through the 16th century, intermediaries of Asian trade. By that route the names of products, plants, objects and realities previously unknown in Europe entered the language. Many of these words Portuguese then passed on to the other European languages.

The most famous case is chá (tea): because the term came from Chinese through Macau, Portuguese says chá [ʃa] where English, which received it by sea from a different region of China, says tea.

Portuguese	Origin	Meaning
chá	Chinese chá	tea (the infusion)
biombo	Japanese byōbu	folding screen
leque	Léquios (Ryukyu Islands)	hand fan
jangada	Malayalam/Tamil	raft of poles
manga	Malayalam/Tamil mānkāy	mango
jaca	Malayalam chakka	jackfruit
catre	Tamil/Malayalam kaṭṭil	low cot
canja	Tamil/Malayalam kañci	rice broth

To this list belong bambu (bamboo), catana (from Japanese katana), bonzo (a Buddhist monk, from Japanese), pagode (pagoda), chita (printed cotton cloth) and many more. The great inventory of this vocabulary is Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado’s Glossário Luso-Asiático, which documents hundreds of terms gathered from Malayalam, Konkani, Malay, Persian, Chinese and Japanese.

Integration and legacy

Both the Germanic and the Asian words became wholly integrated: no one today feels guerra or manga to be foreign, and both follow Portuguese phonology and morphology as a matter of course. The difference lies in their chronology and their manner. The Germanic words are old and few, yet they touch the most basic vocabulary and the stock of names; the Asian words are later and concrete, tied to objects and products, and they bear witness to the moment when the Portuguese language first became global.