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Comment by aitchnyu | Hacker News Reader

Pao led to pan (fancy sandwiches if anime is right) in Japanese and pav (small buns) in Hindi, Indians use the word bread the same. Sabao led to sabun (soap) in Hindi. We have Portuguese-Indian community, of which Rodriguez is the most common name IME, and most common names in many countries. In Malayalam, mesa means table, and plataeu in English.

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Rodrigues, with an 's', and Fernandes are the most common Portuguese influenced surnames in Goa, if I recall correctly.

Such names ending in 'z' are more likely Spanish in origin.

My hunch is that the above poster is slightly imprecise in the spelling but in India it's the Portuguese all the way.

Nope, just different origin centuries. He’s is right about current day portugal and spain, but these names have not been inherited from today’s portuguese.

Language and names evolve. And it’s been more than 5 centuries since portugal reached india

In my experience with Indians with Portuguese origin surnames have generally matched modern orthography.

A search on forebears.io seems to support my experience:

Rodriguez 1 in 2.6 million

Rodrigues 1 in 27 thousand

Rodrigues is modern Portuguese orthography.

Yes, it is.

It’s not as simple. They can be ‘z’ and be Portuguese related, if it is been carried over for generations. The ‘s’ standardization is from the XX century. The Portuguese reached India at the end of the XV century.

In places like Indian, these names have been carried over for many generations, so you can’t compare them directly with modern conterparts

Well, bear in mind that 8-10 centuries ago Castillian, Galician-Portuguese and the rest of Romances overlapped a lot, and they were a lot more similar to each other.

Pinto, Dias, Gomes, Menezes, Mascarenhas, D'Souza, Coutinho, DeSa or D'Sa, Lobo are some other fairly common Portuguese influenced surnames in India, with the most in Goa and next most in Mumbai, but also occur elsewhere, since people move.

>fancy sandwiches if anime is right

From my anime knowledge, it's "bread" though seemingly any meal with bread instead of rice is also called "pan." It also links to the Japanese Wikipedia page for bread.

"Pan" is just bread, all kinds (source: Japanese wife, and I lived in Japan for a while - I did grocery shopping daily)

Another good story is "Vindaloo", which originates from the portuguese "Vinha d'alhos". As expected, the portuguese version is much less spicy :)

The curry you get in restaurants is not Vindaloo. Vindaloo is spicy but it's not the overwhelmingly spicy thing most restaurants sell. A lot of them just rebrand a tangy spicy curry as Vindaloo and sell it. If you have Goan or East Indian Vindaloo, it's spicy, but it also has a lot of sweetness, and it's made of pork.

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