Register and tone

The sixteenth entry is ser dado conhecimento, and the sentence beside it, Ser-lhe-á dado conhecimento da decisão por escrito, contains a verb form worth stopping over. Portuguese normally hangs its unstressed pronouns on the back of the verb with a hyphen — deu-me, avisa-nos — and that alone is unlike anything in English. In the future and the conditional it does something stranger still: the pronoun goes inside. The future of dar is dará; put lhe in it and the verb opens down the middle to let it through, giving dar-lhe-á. The same happens in far-se-á, it will be done, and dir-se-ia, one would say. Grammarians call this mesoclisis, and no other living language descended from Latin still does it. What matters here is not the name but the altitude: the form belongs to statutes, court letters and official notices, and nobody speaks it. Out loud the same news becomes vamos informá-lo por escrito. Meeting a verb split open like that tells you, before you have read the content, exactly how formal the letter intends to be.