A great linguist once joked, “In English, when something tastes good, we say it’s tasty, so then why when something smells good, we don’t say it’s smelly?”
While “tasty” in English means “tasting good,” “smelly” means “smelling stink.” So the suffix “y” in this case has an opposite effect. But like I said before, that’s the thing with the English Language: there are more exceptions than rules.
In Portuguese, however, the rule holds true for both tasty and smelly! The Portuguese word for “taste” is “sabor” and the word for “tasty” is “saboroso.” The Portuguese word for smell is “cheiro” and “sweet smelling” is “cheiroso.”
Whereas English uses the suffix “y” for these two words, Portuguese uses the suffix “oso.”
So if you use the Google translator to find the meaning of “smelly” in Portuguese, will it turn up “cheiroso?” That would definitely be a “literal” translation, but at the same time, it would be wrong. We tried it, and guess what, the Google translator is finetuned enough to work around this hurdle. If you translate “smelly” to Portuguese using the Google Translator, it turns up the word “malcheiroso” which means, “bad smelling.”
Mal=bad
Cheiroso=good smelling.
The word “cheiroso” by itself in Portuguese means “good smelling,” “nice smelling” or “sweet smelling.” You don’t need to put the prefix “bom” in front of it. Bom means “good,” but the suffix “oso” already adds the meaning of “good smelling.” Cheiro = smell. Cheiroso=good smelling.
But, malcheiroso = bad smelling. Languages can be complicated!
We hope you had fun with this langauge lesson!