Describing people precisely

The first entry sits in the sentence é consciencioso e nunca deixa nada por acabar, and nothing in it corresponds to « he ». Portuguese leaves out the subject pronoun whenever the verb already makes the person plain, and the habit is so complete that not one of the thirty-three sentences in this list uses ele or ela as its subject. An English reader translates the adjective and then stalls, because the sentence has to begin with « he » or « she » and the original appears to have said neither. It did say it, only somewhere else. What English keeps in the pronoun, Portuguese keeps in the last letter of the adjective. É consciencioso is a man; é conscienciosa is a woman; é ambiciosa, é modesta and é reservada work the same way, and that vowel is the only thing carrying the news. Which is why the four entries built on a preposition are the genuinely ambiguous ones: é de confiança, é de mente aberta, é pouco de fiar and continua com os pés na terra have no ending to bend, and say nothing whatever about who is meant.