“A Thousand Words in Less Than One Minute”

“André Maurois [French novelist] has recounted an incident between soldiers who met in the trenches during World War I. A Portuguese soldier offered to teach a French soldier a thousand words of Portuguese in less than one minute for 100 francs. The French soldier accepted. ‘Look,’ said the Portuguese, ‘all the words you have in French that end in -tion are the same in Portuguese, except that they end in -ção . . . There are over a thousand of them and they are all feminine gender, just like French. That took less than a minute, didn’t it? One hundred francs, please.’”​—Native Tongues, by Charles Berlitz.

Often this same principle applies in converting English words into French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, and vice versa. Thus many words ending in -tion in English have the same spelling in French, but sometimes with accents added. In Spanish the -tion becomes -ción; in Italian -zione; in Portuguese -ção. Example: nation: nation (Fr.); nación (Sp.); nazione (It.); nação (Port.).