Learn a Thousand Words in a Minute

The "-tion" pattern in the Romance Languages

J.C. Leyendecker, Soldier and the French Girl

Polyglot Charles Berlitz recounts the tale of a Portuguese gentleman who taught a thousand words of his native language to a French friend in less than a minute. He worked this minor miracle by explaining that “all the words in French that end in -tion in French are the same in Portuguese, except that they end in -ção, which you should pronounce as saong. There are more than a thousand of them, and they are all of the feminine gender, just like in French.”¹

The same phenomenon appears in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Romanian. Indeed, it can be found in all modern languages of the Romance family.

1. Charles Berlitz Native Tongues (Edison: Castle Books, 2005) page 27