From port wine to an Iranian bridge in 5 words
One way to travel through languages is to take a word and pull the thread. Let's try it with port wine...
1. Port wine (English)
This is a Portuguese product very much a feature of British culture. By the way, in Portugal we also have a typical product that comes from afar: bacalhau.
The name of port wine, spelled in lower-case letters in English, comes from the name of Porto, a Portuguese city (although, in fact, the wine cellars are in the neighbouring city of Gaia). Porto has a traditional English name, which is…
2. Oporto (English)
A foreign name for a city is called an exonym. Oporto was the traditional English exonym for Porto. It is starting to fall into disuse and, today, we more easily find Porto in English texts.
The origin of “Oporto” is clear: the name merges the Portuguese masculine definite article o with the name Porto.
Curiously, “Algarve” was also formed in a similar fashion. It merges the Arabian article with the noun meaning “West”. “Al”+”garve”: Algarve.
3. Porto (Portuguese)
The name of the city is also a common noun in Portuguese, meaning “harbour”.
Unlike most place names in Portuguese, it is necessary to use the article when talking about the city. So, Portuguese will say "O Porto é uma cidade." (Porto is a city), but "Lisboa é uma cidade" (without the article).
But where does the common noun “porto” comes from?
4. *Pertus (Proto-Indo-European)
The origin of "porto" is the Latin word "portus". This word, in turn, originated from the Proto-Indo-European word "*pértus", which meant something like passage or crossing.
5. Pol (Persian)
The ancient Proto-Indo-European word meant “crossing”. That is the reason why we will find the same word, much altered, in Persian, meaning not “harbour”, but “bridge”. The word is "pol" — it has the same origin as "Porto" and, therefore, as "port [wine]".
So, we pulled the thread and went from port wine to a bridge in Tehran…