Is exactly the sort of thing I love. The writer is Ricardo AraĂșjo Pereira, comedian, columnist and all round good guy (well, as far as I know) Anyway, in the passage above, he’s describing a song by Chico Buarque and saying that if a foreigner were to hear it, although they would rightly spot that it sounds lovely, they probably wouldn’t understand it and certainly wouldn’t notice that the last word of every line is “proparoxĂtona”* and nor would they understand that the word “proparoxĂtono” itself is proparoxĂtona**. And he’s right: it is a lovely song and when I read this in bed last night I had no clue what ProparoxĂtono meant but I knew I had to find out as soon as I woke up.
First of all, let’s hear the song
Oh my god, that is the good stuff alright. I know it’s Brazilian Portuguese, not Portuguese Portuguese but Jesus Christ it’s good. Inject it directly into my veins! There is something slightly strange about the rhythm of the verse though isn’t there? And I never would have spotted what it was.
Before I get I to it, let’s lay a bit of groundwork by thinking about where the stress falls in a Portuguese word.
The vast majority of words in Portuguese put the stress on either the final syllable (if the last letter is r, l, z, u or i ) or the penultimate one (basically, all other letters). Any exceptions to the rule need an accent to be added as a hint to the reader. So for example there are a lot of words that end in – ĂĄvel or – Ăvel that are pronounced with the stress on the a and the i respectively. If the accent wasn’t there you’d have to say incrivEL and confortavEL. But it’s pretty easy and you get used to it, and before you know it, you’re just used to the rhythm of Portuguese speech without even being conscious of it.
ProparoxĂtono means that the stress falls on the antepenultimate (last-but-two) syllable. These always have to have an accent because they break the normal rules, like bĂȘbado (BĂ-ba-do) and mĂĄgico (MĂ-gi-co) and sĂĄbado (SĂ-ba-do) and Ășltima and Ășnico and tĂmido and… Well, and every other word he finishes a line with in the song, which is why you get this effect that’s really unusual in a Portuguese song, where the last two syllables of every line are unstressed.
Oh my god, that’s so satisfying. I love it! It’s the most value I’ve ever got out of a single paragraph, I think: a new word, a new song and a new way of noticing the rhythm of Portuguese music.
Anyway, if you want to know more, this video has some good analysis. It’s in Brazilian Portuguese too, so be warned if you’re trying to avoid the dialect. It’s worth making an exception for though.
*it has an a in the end here, unlike in the title, because its an adjective and palavra is feminine
**Now I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t that the stuff Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying think should be used to cure Covid?” Close, but no, it’s not that either.
My Portuguese practice texts are in Hallowe’en mode, and I’m still getting good mileage out of a book called “Between the Spreadsheets” which I read and reviewed on my other blog, The Data Swarm. Its last chapter is called “Data Horror Stories” and that seemed like a pretty good subject to work with. This one is quite a lot less serious than the data swarm one but it was a lot more fun to write [props to Dani Morgenstern for the corrections]
Cover of “At The Spreadsheets of Madness” by X L Lovecraft
Na semana passada, li um livro chamado “Entre as Folhas de CĂĄlculo” (“Between the Spreadsheets” em inglĂȘs) que explica o problema dos “dados sujos” em projetos* informĂĄticos e como resolvĂȘ-lo antes de ligar o novo sistema.
Igualmente, se o Chthulhu e os seus amigos nĂŁo fossem deuses antigos mas sim contabilistas, teriam inspirado um sentimento de pavor nas mentes dos seres humanos com as suas tabelas dinĂąmicas arrepiantes e isso seria… Diferente…
Acho que todos nĂłs podemos concordar que hĂĄ apenas duas coisas piores do que um deus antigo que utiliza o MS Excel: (1) uma bruxa licenciada em gestĂŁo de projetos e (2) um lobisomem que quer explica os seus motivos com ajuda do MS PowerPoint durante 3 horas.
*=I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed but when I used to write my texts in italki the person who did most of the corrections hated the AO and always insisted I used old spellings. In this case it would have been “projectos”. But on WritestreakPT they are a bit more modern. This is probably for the best since the AO is the standard you should use for tests and so on.
**= “Apanhado com a boca na botija” means “caught with your mouth on the bottle” and it’s equivalent to “caught red handed” except in this case, he’d be caught red-mouthed slurping blood from the neck of his helpless victim.
OK OK I know botija isn’t strictly speaking a bottle it’s a sort of big jar thingy but it’s hard to translate OK, leave me alone.
Coloca os mĂŁos no chĂŁo, tĂŁo distantes* quanto for confortĂĄvel (se estiverem mais distantes uma da outra, os mĂșsculos do peito terĂŁo de trabalhar mais, se estiverem mais perto**, os triceps braquiais irĂŁo retirar mais do treino)
*=Interesting one this. I made this singular and thought of “distant” as applying to the situation as a whole, but of course there are two feet so the adjective has to change too. Odd how little differences in the language make you imagine a situation slightly differently. I read a book a couple of years back called “The Language Hoax” by John McWhorter that argued against the idea that different languages shaped the way we see the world and I think he makes a lot of good points and yet things like this seem like little crumbs of evidence to the contrary.
**=This one almost broke my brain, because although “distante” was changes to “distantes” in the previous sentence, “perto” stays as “perto” even though on the face of it, it’s describing the exact same arrangement of arms and legs. Why? Because perto is an adverb not an adjective. The word it is describing is “estiverem” not “braços”. I know, I know, Just go and make a cupof tea and meditate on it for a while, it’ll make sense after a while.
***I put “tal como” here. Such that the chest touches the floor, but it was changed to “In such a way that the chest touches the floor”.
**** I put “ligados” thinking that would do for “engaged” as in “keep your abs engaged” but no. Contracted.
Nothing to do with portuguese for a change but I’ve just been looking at the spam messages that WordPress has auto-deleted lately. Unbelievable amounts of it, mostly talking about v*pe shops (I’ve asterisked it so as not to encourage them). I wonder why they’ve picked here – and why the same spam bot tries over and over again even though not a single one of its hundreds of messages has made it through to the front page.
Just to demonstrate the incredible educational potential of social media, how else would I have learned this new word?
Dear Mark Zuckerberg,
The new name for Facebook, Meta, can be misunderstood in Portuguese, because it can sound like "Stick it" with the inevitable idea of sticking something up the ass.
I suggest a simple letter change to avoid this misunderstanding: MEITA.
— Francisco Von Silvenstein đ»đđ (@DrCisco) October 28, 2021
I was interested in this passage from Maremoto, the book I finished the other day. In the passage, the protagonist, Boa Morte, is standing around near a bus stop when a guy he’s never met comes up and starts accusing him of stealing and generally giving him a hard time. Xingar is a good word here: to verbally abuse someone. O homem estĂĄ a xingĂĄ-lo
It’s obviously got a strong racial angle: preto being a word for black that is not exactly polite (“negro” is the more acceptable word). I’ve heard it described in a news program as the Portuguese equivalent of the N word, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be that, judging from the contexts I’ve seen it in. It definitely has a charge to it though. Likewise, Farrusco is related to skin colour, but its literal meaning is more like “sooty”. “Vai para a tua terra” means go back to your own country and Escarumba is just a general, derogatory term for a black person.
I was initially confused as to why he then goes on, in the second part of the sentence, to talk about royalty, but I was probably being stupid: he’s just turning the situation around. The guy haranguing him can only see his colour and is making all kinds of assumptions about him, but he says among people who know him better, he is considered to have a regal bearing. It seems quite a good way of dismissing the idiot as an irrelevant know-nothing.
When I asked about this online, quite a few people said it wasn’t necessarily a racist incident. Say what now? It’s true that the book doesn’t say for sure that the aggressor in the situation is white, but everything about the terms he’s using – three words in quick succession that make specific reference to Boa Morte’s skin colour – just make me think that the speaker doesn’t share that skin colour. I pointed this out, but the Portuguese peeps replied that there were rivalries and snobberies between black Portuguese people and Africans and then within the African community between different nationalities and tribal groupings and that it’s not unheard of for different groups to say ostensibly racist things to each other as a result. Nobody from within Portugal contradicted this point of view; nobody said it sounded like a racist incident. Every Portuguese person who expressed an opinion said it seemed ambiguous to them.
Mmweellll, I’m from outside the culture so I’m reluctant to flat out contradict them but I must say that gets a big đ€ from me. If anyone else reading this knows the book, I’d love to hear how you read it and whether or not you agree.
Anyway, it all sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it, but Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is a good enough writer that she can handle a pretty heavy subject with a lightness of touch. It’s quite a funny scene, believe it or not!
Este livro conta a histĂłria de Boa Morte da Silva, nativo de Bissau, residente em Lisboa e as suas amizades, principalmente com uma mulher sem abrigo que se chama Fatinha. HĂĄ capĂtulos narrados na terceira pessoa mas a maioria na primeira, como se o protagonista estivesse a falar Ă sua filha que ainda mora em Bissau e que mal conhece (nem sequer sabe se ou nĂŁo ela estĂĄ viva)
Hey, do you want to try a little game? It’s a game about games. Meta.
Here are some descriptions in Portuguese of British children’s games. See if you can work out which one I am desperately trying to describe in my clunky, awkward Portuguese. They’re all traditional playground favourites – the original challenge was to list the games that would be included in Squid Game if it were to be remade in your own home country, so they should be pretty recognisable but I’ll put the answers at the bottom.
Credit section: didn’t come up with the list: I pinched it off a friend on another site but it “bateu certo com as escolhas que eu faria”. The very kind u/dani_morgenstern corrected the first 6 of the texts and u/H_doofenschmirtz sorted the last, but I’ve made some minor changes since, so any remaining goofs are my own)
Probably a bit of a clue here, but which one is it?
Quando era novo, este jogo era o mais aborrecido de sempre mas ao mesmo tempo, viciante. Só jogåvamos se não houvesse nada mais para fazer mas uma vez que começåvamos, continuåvamos durante a tarde toda. E hå quem ande a jogar na nossa rua em 2021 ainda que existam portåteis e consolas.
What’s The Time Mr Wolf? (the Portuguese equivalent of this is called “MamĂŁ da licença?”)
Red Arse (this is the only one I hadn’t actually played before – the person who wrote the list is younger than me so maybe it’s after my time)
Theft and Shrubbery
Theft and Shrubbery provavelmente nĂŁo existia na realidade – um comediante contou a histĂłria num programa televisivo e afirmou que era verdadeira mas… đ€)
** I thought I’d be clever here and use mesoclise because it’s in the conditional tense but it’s a negative statement so you have to use proclise. Don’t know what either of those words mean? Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. It’s just about where the pronoun goes, relative to the verb.
*** One of the weird idiosyncrasies of the language is that the verb “saber” can mean “ter sabor” (see here, definition #9) but it seems to be a bit tricky to use. I tried “sabem nojento” but that was a no.
Luso 