Archives and records

The thirteenth entry is a preservação digital a longo prazo, and the English verb inside it is steady while its noun is not. « To preserve » behaves exactly as preservar does, keeping a thing from perishing, which is what an archive spends its money on, and the long noun « preservation » is equally sober. Drop the ending, though, and the bare noun goes somewhere else entirely. In the kitchen, « preserves » are fruit boiled with sugar and sealed in a jar, and a shop sells them beside the honey. On an estate, « a preserve » is ground kept for the use of one owner and closed to everybody else, and from that came the figurative sense now heard far more often than either of the others: a subject is called « the preserve of » whoever guards it, and the sentence is almost always a complaint. Portuguese shares none of this. A preservação holds its single sense, the jam is a compota, and the closed ground is a reserva de caça. So read the long noun of this entry straight, and take care with the short one.