Nhac Nhac!

Some time ago I installed a Portuguese-English dictionary on my phone. It’s really useful as it doesn’t need an internet connection and it has the handy feature of keeping a list of all the words you look up – a ready-made revision list for when you’re feeling studious. It’s not 100% perfect though – there are rare occasions when it doesn’t list a word I’m looking for. This happened last weekend when we were in Cachoeira Paulista.

The word I was looking for begins with “Nh” which still strikes me as a strange combination of letters to start a word with. As far as I can tell (disclaimer: I know even less about Spanish than I do about Portuguese) “Nh” in Portuguese is the equivalent of the Spanish “Ñ” – it makes that “nya” sound that you hear in words like “new” and “lasagna” (jeez, now I’m straying into Italian! Turn back!).

When I checked my phone dictionary for words beginning with “Nh”, I found just 2 entries:

Nhoque

This is how Portuguese speakers spell Gnocchi, those little dumplings you find at the cheap end of the menu in Italian restaurants. It’s actually a great word to illustrate how the Portuguese language takes a word from abroad and adapts the spelling to fit the rules of Portuguese. As far as I know (disclaimer number 2), a word beginning with “Gn” would be pronounced “Ge-ne” (with a hard g), so they replaced that with the “Nh”. To make a hard “Ke” sound they needed to use “que”, so you end up with an identical sounding word that is spelt completely differently!

Gnocchi, Nhoque, Ñoqui (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish). Source

Nhenhenhém

I have never seen or heard this word before! My phone dictionary tells me it means “idle talk or chatter” and according to the internet, the origins of this word go back to the days when the Portuguese explorers first arrived in Brazil. The Tupi word for ‘talk’ is Nhe and when the Portuguese showed up, the indigenous people heard a lot of talk but understood nothing. To them it was meaningless, so this word Nhen-nhen-nhen evolved to describe meaningless talk, equivalent to the English “blah-blah-blah”.

A Tupi woman.

Nhac

So finally we arrive at the Nh word that I saw in Cachoeira Paulista (sorry, I have a tendency to go off on tangents). Nhac (Nyack!) is a word associated with eating, equivalent to something like “munch” in English, so it made me smile to see it here:

Nhac Donald’s! This food van serves up snacks, sandwiches, noodles and baked potatoes. I suspect the food is considerably less revolting than that of the chain they’re imitating…

Ok, that’s all for nhow. Have a nhice day and I’ll see you nhext time.