Nature and the environment

Entry twenty-five is em vias de extinção, and it is the place on this list where a word-for-word rendering stops being clumsy and starts being wrong. A via is a road, so the phrase says, literally, on the ways of extinction: the thing is not gone, it is travelling towards being gone. English once had the same picture and abandoned it. What it uses now is a single participle, « endangered », and the noun beside it is nearly always the same one — « an endangered species », « the endangered list ». So O lince ibérico esteve em vias de extinção is « the Iberian lynx was endangered », four Portuguese words answered by one. Two habits follow from that. « In danger of extinction » exists, but it belongs to a committee report rather than to a sentence anybody says aloud. And the Portuguese mould is productive where the English word is not: em vias de takes almost any noun of process after it — em vias de resolução, em vias de desenvolvimento — whereas « endangered » takes nothing at all. It is one word that learned one job and does only that.