Linguists experience the world differently. For me at least, it’s hard to turn off the part of my brain that is constantly analyzing the words I hear and see around me.

A case in point is the news coverage of the recent presidential election in Brazil. As you may know, on October 4 Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, was defeated by the incumbent president Lula da Silva. According to news reports today, Bolsonaro was ordered to surrender his passport after the election, but instead fled to Florida.

The first time I read the name Flávio Bolsonaro in the newspaper, I thought the accent mark on Flávio was a typographical error. After all, Flavio is a common name in Spanish, but doesn’t have an accent mark. So as the saga developed, while I was curious about what was happening and why, I mostly wanted to understand the accent mark. Portuguese has more vowel sounds than Spanish, and uses accent marks (and other diacritic marks) to differentiate them, so I thought that perhaps the á in Flávio was a different ‘flavor’ from a plain a, as in Manuel.

Instead, it turns out that the accent mark in Flávio is the result of a difference and a similarity between Spanish and Portuguese:

• In Portuguese the vowel combination io counts as two syllables (i + o), but in Spanish it counts as one. More formally, we can say that the two vowels are in hiatus in Portuguese but form a diphthong in Spanish. So Portuguese Flávio has three syllables (fla-vi-o) but Spanish Flavio has two (fla-vio).
• In both languages, if the antepenultimate (third from the end) syllable of a word is stressed, it must have an accent mark. An example that works for both languges is político. The “fla” syllable, which is stressed in both Flávio and Flavio, is antepenultiimate in Portuguese but penultimate in Spanish, so only Flávio requires an accent mark.

Now that I’ve gotten this out of my system, I can focus on the actual news as the story continues.