Yes, "palonuno" means the letter "A". That was told to me by my parents many years ago. I accepted it as true. Perhaps just a family tale? I believe my sister witnessed, but that I am not so sure. At some point when I was a kid I pointed some kind of sign with letter "A" and called it "palonuno". We used latin pronunciation as at that time my family moved back to Brazil where Portuguese is the language (not Spanish). So "A" has the sound of "fAther". The "O" pronounces like the "O" in "OK". "U" is the "U" in "put".
So why just say "A" if you can call it "PALONUNO"? ;)
To make it little harder, I decided to turn this new vocabulary case-sensitive, so it became pAlonuno, with capital A between lowercases. Easy.
pAlonuno is just a unique name. Unique names are like primary keys, makes data organization possible. At some point in 20th century, the words Yahoo or Google did not exist. Believe me, ithey sounded weird. Google ended up becoming a verb in English: To Google. Yahoo not so much. But future is unpredictable, so let's just wait and see where pAlonuno will go.
To make it little harder, I decided to turn this new vocabulary case-sensitive, so it became pAlonuno, with capital A between lowercases. Easy.
pAlonuno is just a unique name. Unique names are like primary keys, makes data organization possible. At some point in 20th century, the words Yahoo or Google did not exist. Believe me, ithey sounded weird. Google ended up becoming a verb in English: To Google. Yahoo not so much. But future is unpredictable, so let's just wait and see where pAlonuno will go.
Eduardo was, at that time, 24 months (2 years) old and would always happily exclaim the word "Palonuno!" as he recognized something in outdoors and plates with names of business. He was slow to start to talk when compared with his older sister. He also had difficulty in pronouncing certain sounds like "R" and "G".
ReplyDeleteOne day we were watching TV when a soap opera called "E S C A L A D A" was starting. He promptly walked to the screen and shouted joyfuly pointing to the letters "A" of the title which were appearing one by one: Palonuno! Palonuno! Palonuno!
We had finally discovered our "Rosetta stone"
that allowed us to decode "Palonuno".
I then tried (to no avail) to tell him that humanity spent many centuries to call it simply "A" and he (that little creature) was suggesting a four syllable word!
We then gradually started to show him the names of the initial letters of close relatives: "M" from Marlene, "T" from Tânia and só on. When it came to aunt Vera, he volunteered the name of the first letter: "Palonuno VIADO!!!". Trying to speak the word "VIRADO" (= upside down) he stated a word that in Portughese is used as a synonim of "queer, fag".