Author: Colin Lusk

Just a data nerd
Posted in English, Portuguese

Buarque Ode

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve really got quite evangelical about this Chico Buarque song, you know. I insist that everyone should learn Portuguese so they can appreciate its greatness. Here’s something I wrote about it in WritestreakPT, and this probably won’t be the last time I mention it either!

Acabo de ler um capítulo do meu livro (“Idiotas Úteis e Inúteis” de Ricardo Araújo Pereira) no qual o autor descreve uma canção do cantor brasileiro Chico Buarque chamada “Construção”. A letra da canção tem um ritmo ligeiramente diferente do que o padrão. Porquê*? Seguindo o Ricardo, é por causa de… Hum… uma palavra desconhecida. Ainda por cima, mal consegui pronúnciá-la! Estava a ler na cama e o dicionário na mesa de cabeceira também a desconhecia, portanto tive de aguardar até hoje de manhã.

A palavra era “Proparoxítono”**. Significa que a palavra tem o acento tónico na antepenúltima sílaba. Todas as palavras de cada linha são proparoxítonas. Em resultado disso, a canção soa muito diferente de qualquer outra canção portuguesa que já ouvi.
Que colheita boa! Num único capítulo, aprendi uma nova palavra, ouvi falar duma nova canção (que é mesmo bonita – acreditem!) e ganhei um novo ponto de vista sobre a língua.

* miraculously the corrector found only one single error in this entire thing except that they thought this should change to “por quê?”. This surprised me a bit because explanations of the various types of por/que usually have only 3 forms and “por quê” is not one of them. According to ciberdúvidas it can be used if you are asking “for what?” but it doesn’t mean “why” according to Elsa Fernandes’s book so at the risk of sounding arrogant, I don’t think the corrector was quite on the mark here. [UPDATE – A better corrector came along and agreed that yes, I was right about Porquê, but they have also pointed out some other mistakes which I have since corrected in the text above. It wasn’t terrible…]

** Amazingly there is a second word for this. Two words meaning “having the accent on the antepenultimate syllable”! It’s like the Eskimos and snow! The other word is Esdrúxulo.

And finally if you’re wondering what you call words that have the stress on the final or penultimate syllable they are oxítono and paroxítono respectively.

Posted in English

Proparoxítono

Posted on by Colin Lusk

This 👇

Is exactly the sort of thing I love. The writer is Ricardo Araújo 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 “proparoxítona”* and nor would they understand that the word “proparoxítono” itself is proparoxítona**. And he’s right: it is a lovely song and when I read this in bed last night I had no clue what Proparoxítono 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 – ável or – ível 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.

Proparoxítono 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 bêbado (BÊ-ba-do) and mágico (MÁ-gi-co) and sábado (SÁ-ba-do) and última and único and tímido 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.

Posted in Portuguese

Halloween Special #2 – Contos de Terror No Escritório – Sangue, Morte e Folhas de Cálculo

Posted on by Colin Lusk

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 Cálculo” (“Between the Spreadsheets” em inglês) que explica o problema dos “dados sujos” em projetos* informáticos e como resolvê-lo antes de ligar o novo sistema.

No último capítulo, a autora fala de “contos de terror” em relação aos dados que prejudicaram as reputações das empresas e causaram problemas graves aos funcionários. Mas parece-me que “conto de terror” não é a analogia certa. Os terríveis monstros dos clássicos do terror nunca utilizaram folhas de cálculo. Por exemplo, quando o Drácula foi apanhado com a boca na botij….hum…na senhora**, era só por causa da sede. Se tivesse um portátil com uma janela aberta com o MS Excel, a história seria muito diferente. Melhor? Pior? Quem sabe?

Igualmente, se o Chthulhu e os seus amigos não fossem deuses antigos mas sim contabilistas, teriam inspirado um sentimento de pavor nas mentes dos seres humanos com as suas tabelas dinâmicas arrepiantes e isso seria… Diferente…

Acho que todos nós podemos concordar que há apenas duas coisas piores do que um deus antigo que utiliza o MS Excel: (1) uma bruxa licenciada em gestão 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.

Posted in Portuguese

Hallowe’en Special #1 – Filmes de Terror Slasher

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Corrected Text from u/WritestreakPT. Thanks to Dani Morgenstern for the corrections

Filmes de terror slasher são um género clássico do cinema assim como a ficção científica, os filmes de guerra e as comédias sobre rapazes adolescentes a tentarem perder a virgindade.

Lembro-me das minhas primeiras experiências com este género, principalmente o Halloween e o Nightmare on Elm Street (“Pesadelo em Elm Street”). O Halloween era mais realista porque o antagonista é um homem vivo mas ainda assim, não raras vezes, o realizador (John Carpenter) tomou algumas liberdades com as leis do tempo e do espaço para ter o assassino num lugar inesperado para assustar Jamie Lee Curtis (e nos espectadores!) vez após vez.

A saga do Pesadelo em Elm Street era mais engraçada e tornou-se cada vez mais ridícula ao longo dos anos, mas tinha os seus sustos na mesma! Mas a bolha rebentou finalmente com a estreia do Scream, que deu cabo da magia do género. Os protagonistas explicaram, de modo pormenorizado, as regras do assassinato no grande ecrã logo antes de eles mesmos passarem a ser vítimas. Depois disso, tornou-se quase impossível fazer um filme do género slasher porque toda a gente ironizaria os clichés.

Posted in Portuguese

Como Fazer Flexões de Braços

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Começa na posição prona, com os pés juntos e com todo o teu peso no peito.

Man photo created by cookie_studio – www.freepik.com

Coloca os mãos no chão, tão distantes* quanto for confortável (se estiverem mais distantes uma da outra, os músculos do peito terão de trabalhar mais, se estiverem mais perto**, os triceps braquiais irão retirar mais do treino)

Estende os braços devagar de modo a que*** o peito fique erguido do chão, até os cotovelos ficarem direitos. Mantém os abdominais contraídos**** e a coluna vertebral neutra.

Abaixa o corpo de novo para o chão.

Descansa. Já sofreste o suficiente. Precisas é***** de um café e da empatia da tua família.

*=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.

***** I think this is my first successful attempts to insert one of these little emphatic “é”s into a sentence. Sadly I made a mistake in another part of teh sentence so it wasn’t a 100% success, but I’ll call it a small vitory!

Posted in English

Spam

Posted on by Colin Lusk

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.

Posted in English

Trolling Mark Zuckerberg

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Just to demonstrate the incredible educational potential of social media, how else would I have learned this new word?

mei·ta

(origem obscura)
nome feminino

[Portugal, Calão]  Esperma.


“meita”, in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa [em linha], 2008-2021, https://dicionario.priberam.org/meita [consultado em 29-10-2021].

Selada De Fruta had a take on it too, but I already knew this word so it wasn’t as useful

Posted in English

An Incident

Posted on by Colin Lusk

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 está a xingá-lo

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

“Chamou-me preto de Guinea, farrusco vai para a tua terra, escarumba eu sei lá que mais, aqui na rua há quem diga que pareço realeza, não sei se é verdade, o povo Cuanhama é conhecido pela sua majestade”

Maremoto – Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

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 🤔 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!

Posted in Portuguese

Maremoto – Djamilia Pereira de Almeida

Posted on by Colin Lusk
Maremoto de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
Maremoto

Este livro conta a história 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. Há capítulos narrados na terceira pessoa mas a maioria na primeira, como se o protagonista estivesse a falar à sua filha que ainda mora em Bissau e que mal conhece (nem sequer sabe se ou não ela está viva)

É muito bem escrito, até eu sou capaz de apreciar a confiança com a qual ela esboça as personagens e as cenas nas quais eles se encontram. Como muitos livros portugueses, custou-me julgar o “tom” da história. Na maior parte, havia um sentido de ternura em relação às personagens, sobretudo na amizade entre Boa Morte e a Fatinha mas também há momentos de humor.