In this section we will compare the sounds of Spanish with the sounds of Portuguese. We will illustrate our comments with cognates in order to help you transfer vocabulary items from Spanish into Portuguese.
You will recall that Spanish has just five vowels, a e i o u. These same five familiar vowel sounds, pronounced essentially as you know them in Spanish, occur frequently in Portuguese, but they are interspersed with seven additional vowel sounds, new ones that do not exist in Spanish. The existence of these seven additional vowels and their several diphthongs means that you must now learn to operate within a more extensive vowel system. It also means that you will have to exercise considerable caution in transferring the five Spanish vowels, particularly in cognates. You cannot do so as freely as you would like, as you will discover on these pages.
In addition to accommodating yourself to the seven new vowels, you will also need to learn to handle some very common variations of the familiar a, e and o. These variations occur for the most part when these vowels occur at the ends of words and are unstressed. We discuss each of these in turn below.
The Portuguese a has a special variant, not occurring in Spanish, which will probably cause you some problems during your early days of study. We will arbitrarily elect to write this
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