WAGS 2025 04 09: Dam Good - Walk and Lunch

Not sure if we will get a Leader´s report this week. But, in case not, briefly, we met for the second week running at Café Silva, drove up to the Funcho Dam to inspect the water levels and were most encouraged to see that it was full to the brim. We then climbed a long winding road up towards the Lynx Sanctuary and then drove back to Café Silva for lunch where Paul and his daughter Tanya and her family joined us.

The Starters: Hazel, JohnH, Lesley, Maria, Myriam and Rod
(plus three AWWs on their way to a more serious walk.)

The Dam Keeper´s Cat

 

This track map shows the interconnection of Funcho (top) and Arade (below)

Light-hearted

Serious

Fooling around

Artistic

Statistics - irrelevant. Very short and very slow.

The Lunch

Omelette, (of course)

Vitela Estufada

Arroz de Pato

Arroz de Marisco

This Week´s Talking Point (a.ka. Food for Thought:)

In fact it´s from input Myriam who refers back to something we had talked about the previous week when some of us were sheltering from the storm in Café Silva

"Hi, all, 

I have just recalled the subject of the Portuguese alphabet you raised on Wednesday during our hiding from the storm. 

I did not say much because there was no Internet connection to back up what I had known all along. 

As we all know (?), in ancient Portuguese the letter y was used instead of i, and ph were used instead of f, an elongated f was used instead of s, k was used like in English, as still can be seen in tombstones and church inscriptions. 

There were 23 letters, no w, in the alphabet. 

Thanks to Google, now I realised that these were used until as late as 1911.

Then k and y were taken off. In addition were ç, ch, lh, nh. Total 25 letters. 

Later on those additions were not considered alphabet, and only 23 letters remained. 

Now modern Portuguese alphabet contains 24 letters just like in English (sic). 

Though k, w and y are mainly used in foreign words. 

The following link gives you all the dates when they were officially changed. 

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_portugu%C3%AAs?wprov=sfla1"

Obviously, more to talk about. That fount of all correct knowledge, the BBC  does say on the web that Portuguese has a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters, the same as English. The same site also says that the letter "h" is silent in Portuguese. The name of the letter "h" is hagga, which sounds Greek to me. "K" is kappa which also sounds

Greek.

Myriam has also suggested somewhere (although I seem to have lost that bit) that we talk about being blue-blooded. Blue-blooded people in English call the letter "h"  " aitch", less well-blooded people have been known to call it "haitch." But "h" is pronounced in English which thankfully enables English-speakers to distinguish between

 "air-conditioning" and "hair-conditioning." 

Next week´s banter should be able to clear it all up.