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by joemaffei 1807 days ago
Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, retained this nasalization.
3 comments

Portuguese has a lot of interesting stuff going on with nasal consonants. It always strikes me that they go for writing <m> in places other romance languages chose <n>. This also hints that over the history of latin languages, nasal consonants may have been kinda flexible.

I used to look at those topics and think in terms of what is "more like Latin", but at one point I realized... All of them are probably accurately capturing some form of the history of Latin, and there isn't right or wrong.

For words ending in "L" as well ... "som" (sound), "Brasil" (Brazil), the last consonants are dropped. Words ending in R like "lar" (home) often get a gutteralized or dropped R.
Portuguese did not retain the Latin nasal vowels, it was an independent development after the Latin nasal vowels had been lost.