The guy is talking about places in the world that are used as placeholders for “a long way away” like Timbuktu or Outer Mongolia in english.
I know the phrase No cu de Judas* exists, which is equivalent to phrases like “the back of beyond” or “the arse end of nowhere”, but it’s a little unsatisfying because – well, firstly because he is talking about real places in the world that are thought of as far away, but it’s worse than that because he mixes up the idea of… well, tell you what, rather than blather on, here’s how I asked about it on Reddit, and I’ll tell you the answers afterwards. I had a bad case of morning head when I wrote it so the grammar is probably not great:
Vi um vídeo no YouTube sobre “Timbuktu”. Em inglês, se quisermos falar de algures que fica longe, falamos de ‘timbuktu’ (no Mali) ou de ‘Outer Mongolia’ (ou seja Mongólia), ambos dos quais ficam longe de nós e funcionam como marcadores de ser longe da civilização. Segundo o narrador, cada país tem a sua própria noção de onde fica este sítio remoto.
É confuso porque o narrador mistura duas ideias: (1) Longe de aqui, e. (2) Num sítio remoto, onde é difícil chegar de qualquer ponto de partida.
Eu sei que existe a expressão “no Cu de Judas”, que significa mais ou menos “num lugar distante” mas não sei se isso é o único exemplo.
Bonus question: além disso, sei que existe um lugar verdadeiro nos Açores chamado “Cu de Judas”. Mas qual existia primeiro? O lugar foi nomeado por causa da expressão ou o lugar já existia e a gente começou a dizer “o meu primo está sei lá onde, talvez no Cu de Judas” e a expressão desenvolveu daí?
I got a few answers, and u/Butt_Roidholds gave me a really good list, and I’ve added a few from other people. Obviously quite a lot of these are even ruder than “No Cu de Judas” so don’t go blurting them out in front of your maiden aunt. Italics = additions or notes that weren’t part of the main list)
na Cochinchina; (This is the only one that refers to a real place, I think: Cochin China = the southern part of Vietnam, so I think it’s probably the only legit answer to the question the guy is posing in the video.)
onde o diabo perdeu as botas; (I also heard “onde Judas perdeu as botas”)
onde o vento faz a curva;
para lá do sol-posto;
nos cornos da lua;
nos quintos do caralho (ou simplesmente nos quintos);
no fim do mundo;
nos confins da terra (ou simplesmente nos confins);
nos andurriais (normalmente alude a sítios ermos ou caminhos inviáveis);
em cascos de rolha (normalmente alude a sítio rural);
Parvónia (normalmente alude a sítio rural);
em Santa Cona dos Assobios; (if you’re not sure what that means, I’ll tell you: it means “In Saint Cunt of the Whistles”. I mean… that’s quite an expression!)
onde os grelos batatam;
No caralho mais velho;
Na casa do caralho;
Onde Cristo não passou.
*”In Judas’s arse”. There’s a book called this by António Lobo Antunes but I’ve never read it. Ines Rebelo tortures her boyfriend on camera by asking him to try and guess the meanings of a few portuguese phrases, including this one… he’s (ahem) pretty wide of the mark (at around 11:45)
Quando elas vierem a casa, lembra-lhes para regarem as flores no rés do chão.
Eu faltei aos ensaios e, por isso, não vou em digressão pelo Canadá. (I actually feel like my wrong answer wasn’t totally wrong: dedicar-se was an option so I put “dedico-me aos”. I feel like that works but the book says no No, apparently not, because the ensaios are rehearsals for the tour. Duh!)
O pai do nosso amigo Charles valeu-se do cargo que ocupa para lhe arranjar trabalho no Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros.
O presidente faltou à palavra e adotou essa lei discriminatória
Levantei-me as cinco de manhã; faltou pouco para amanhecer.
Thanks to Cristina for spotting the typos & the misunderstanding in the first version.
Wow, this girl is really smashing the bilingual life! She lives in Harrogate but speaks Brazilian portuguese, having been raised bilingual, so she seems to have become a bit of a celebrity in Brazil, describing English lifestyle to a Brazilian audience in what is apparently a perfect regional accent. Harrogate is the posh bit of North Yorkshire, but even so, I feel like she’s a bit more Downton Abbey than the average nine year old even in her home town. But no worries, it’s YouTube and I love that she’s made that connection across the Atlantic! You go, girl!
This slightly confusing question was raised by Paul Freixinho in his Palavra Cruzadas newsletter today and it was obvious from the way he answered it that readers would be in on the joke.
Filhós é o plural de filhó
Filhoses é o plural de filhós
What could it mean? Well, it seems to be a linguistic quirk. A filhó is a kind of mini doughnut/pancake type treat with a little lemon zest, rolled in sugar, and I guess some people eat them at Christmas, judging from the fact that he mentions it in his Christmas newsletter.
But what makes it weird is that some people call it a filhós. That’s given as a straight synonym in priberam. So it seems if you call it filhó then the plural is filhós, but if you call it filhós then the plural is filhoses.
A couple of spelling notes here: firstly, some people spell it “filhozes” but that’s just wrong. And secondly, it doesn’t need an accent because the accent in filhós is only there to shift the stress into the last syllable, but once you add the – es on the end, the stress naturally falls on the o anyway!
There’s a recipe for them here if you fancy trying them, and a specific Christmas version here, which is slightly boozer, spicier and fruitier, made with yeast; so leaning in more of a doughnut direction than a pancake direction. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to call them whatever you like!
(Thank you to Paulo Freixinho for bringing this to my attention and if you don’t already have his book, but you like crosswords, you could do a lot worse than score yourself a copy, which you can do on his website!)
Here are a couple of things that have come up recently that I thought were worth pointing out. basically, it boils down to this: singers are lying to us. Wake up, sheeple! The global songwriting elite, at the behest of the pentaverate, are deliberately spreading misinformation because they only care about their rhyme schemes and something called “poetry”, whatever that is.
Me explaining lyrics of “A Cabritinha” to the boys at Kew-Anon
We’re sometimes told that learning song lyrics can help us to learn portuguese. Well, up to a point. We learn quite a lot from it, but there is something you need to remember – and it’s what we call poetic license. Basically, singers need to make their lines scan, and they need to make everything rhyme, and as a result, what you get sounds good but isn’t always the most natural speech. This is true in english too of course: it’s near Christmas now, and no doubt many foreigners are listening to Christmas songs. Do we really say “The bells are ringin’ OUT for Chrismas Day”? Not really. And have you ever heard anyone who wasn’t singing say “Have YOURSELF a merry LITTLE christmas”? Obviously we have to be aware that there’ll be stuff like this in portuguese lyrics too.
I’ve had a couple of instances lately where I’ve phrased something a certain way in a text and been told it was wrong and I’ve thought, wait, I’m sure I’ve heard that structure in a song. One was “Que desmancha prazeres que eu sou” (“what a spoilsport I am!”). When challenged on this I appealed to Chief Judge Ana Bacalhau who sings this lyric in one of Deolinda’s songs:
Sou da geração sem remuneração. E não me incomoda esta condição. Que parva que eu sou.
It’s not ungrammatical of course, but it has more syllables than it needs to have. It doesn’t need two “ques” and it doesn’t need the pronoun either.
In another context, I told someone: “nao há obrigaçãoalguma”. I would normally use “nenhum(a)” but I’d heard it with “algum(a)” in the following line by notable sadness-enjoyer, Ana Moura, and I decided to try it out for myself:
Cantá-lo bem sem sequer o ter sentido Senti-lo como ninguém, mas não ter sentido algum
But apparently that line should really “não ter sentido nenhum” but it obviously didn’t sound as good in the wider song so they seem to have just switched it. Terrible! If we can’t trust fadistas to teach us the true path, who can we trust?
Next time I see that Ana Moura, she owes me a beer.
Ouvi falar desta artista recentemente (Onde? Quando? De quem? Nem sequer me lembro!) e decidi fazer uma pesquisa. Não estou a par das correntes do mundo artístico: poucas vezes entro numa galeria e se, por acaso, ouvir algo sobre a arte moderna os factos entram por um ouvido e saem por outro. Mas o site da artista impressionou-me muito: ela oferece um vasto leque de competências na criação das suas obras: há estátuas de ferro forjado, corações de Viana construídos de talheres de plástico, um carro enfeitado de ouro, um helicóptero com penas cor-de-rosa e brilhantes por todo o lado no exterior (o transporte pessoal de Elton John?) e algumas esculturas tão extensivas* que parecem cenários de filmagem! Além da arte, está a utilizar uma espécie de engenharia.
Até certo ponto, lembra-me a obra do Bordalo II, cujas esculturas alegram as ruas de Portugal. Ambos produzem obras de tamanho impressionante e cores marcantes, mas enquanto as dele são feitas de materiais reciclados, como garrafas, pneus e embalagem, dando um ar improvisado e bruto aos seus animais fofos, as obras de Joana Vasconcelos são compostas de materiais requintados; brilhantes e limpos; mesmo que os materiais escolhidos sejam frequentemente fora do normal (por exemplo “a noiva”, feita de milhares de tampões), o objetivo é tornar o quotidiano belo, quase o oposto do outro artista.
As obras de Joana Vasconcelos podem ser encontradas neste canto da Internet**. É deslumbrante, até na ecrã. Numa galeria, hão de ser ainda melhores!
Some of Joana Vasconcelos’s artworks
*This is probably a weird choice of adjective for a sculpture but there are some that really spread out over a wide area of ground which is why I’ve said they remind me of a film set in some sort of Sci-fi scenario, but you’d normally want something more like “gigante” or “imenso”, I think.
**Another daft choice of words. Why “corner of the Internet”? Well, that’s just what we used to call a website when I was into amateur web design in the early 00s. “Welcome to my corner of the Internet”. I won’t change it here, but it’s a good reminder that if you choose to express yourself in interesting, colourful ways like this, your audience might not think “gosh, how quirky and charming” they might just think “you have clearly made a mistake and we won’t know what you’re taking about” so maybe sometimes it’s better to stick to taking like a sensible person.
So I was asked a question about something I said in the post about Linguee the other day. I said that I thought Google Translate (aka Gtranslate) was better than Deepl for certain things. Both are translation apps, but Deepl is usually thought of as better at European portuguese, so people will usually recommend it. That’s usually good advice: if you didn’t know any Portuguese and you wanted to translate something into European Portuguese you’re usually better off with Deepl.
Deepl (left) correctly translates this book title into European Portuguese while Gtranslate comes up with the Brazilian version.
So why did I say Gtranslate was better? Because we’re language students, so I think we usually don’t want the app to do all the work for us. English-Portuguese translation isn’t something we need often. But what we do want is the opposite: we want it to check our work by translating it back into English because of it can understand it then that’s a pretty good indicator that we got it right.
So for example, if I’ve written “Este carro é muito carro”, what I want is for it to say “this car is very car”, so I know I’ve goofed; I’ve put an extra r in “caro”. If it translated it correctly as “this car is very expensive”, I wouldn’t notice my idiocy.
And so I thought Deepl would be less useful because it is AI and it’s cleverer, which means if you did something like this it would be more likely to guess what you meant and translate it correctly, hiding the error and lulling you into a false sense of security.
Líliana, (whose website The Talking Sardines caters for early stage learners around A1/A2), asked for an example so I tried a few. Want to see if I was right? Read on!
Let Battle Commence
OK, so let’s put both apps in the Thunderdome together and see which emerges victorious. Two apps enter, one app leaves. In each round, I have presented the translators with a sentence with a couple of minor errors. Remember, it’s a backwards competition. What I want is for it to give the wrong answer because that’s more useful than hiding the mistake.
In each case, Deepl on the left, Gtranslate on the right
“Gosto de escreve contas de fada”
Escreve should be an infinitive “escrever” and a fairy tale is a “conto de fado”, not a “conta de fado”
Deepl responded to “conta de fada” better, by translating it literally. Gtranslate is cleverer (ie less useful) because it has hidden the mistake, but Gtranslate also makes change suggestions – in the middle of the screen it asks: “Será que quis dizer…”, meaning “Did you mean to say…” and there it gets bonus points for spotting the grammatical error in escrever and suggesting I change it. Great!
Result: tie! Each spotted one mistake and ignored the other.
Well, this is a surprise. Maybe I was too harsh on Deepl?
“Os caos ladram tudo a noite”
The word cão (Dog) has one of those weird plurals: cães. The word “caos” does exist but it means “chaos”. Oh and and obviously I’ve used “tudo” (everything) in place of “toda” (all).
This would make a great album title, wouldnt it? Gtranslate has a helpful suggestion, but both have correctly translated one mistake and erased the other
Result: tie! Both get one right, one wrong. Whether or not you want it to spoon feed the answer is a matter of taste so I don’t give Gtranslate extra points for that.
“Estou na quinda a trater dos porcos”
Quinta and tratar are both spelled wrong
Deepl is just freestlying. I don’t even know what it’s thinking there. Gtranslate has translated it correctly (not helpful) but it has very cleverly and helpfully suggests that I fix both spelling errors. Great work!
Result: Gtranslate is victorious. Initially it loses marks for ostensibly ignoring the errors, but it scores top marks for prompting me to fix both, not just the first. Deepl only highlights one mistake.
“Estou na fazendo a elementar os gansos”
Fazenda is another word for farm (I think I’m right in saying it’s more specifically a larger, family owned farm), whereas fazendo is just the present participle of fazer. And the verb I’m looking for is “alimentar”.
Both helpfully mistranslated both words. Gtranslate is correctly able to suggest the correction for one of them at least.
Result: tie! Both have done their job correctly, translating garbage into garbage. Whether or not you want the extra help Gtranslate gives you is a matter of taste.
“O gato está a cazar rattos”
Caçar and ratos are both spelled wrong.
Deepl tries to be clever and interpret cazar but guesses the z is supposed to be a g. It has no idea what I am talking about with the extra t in rattos. Good. Gtranslate cleverly translates both words correctly, which is unhelpful, but it redeems itself by suggesting corrections for both words.
Result: Deepl is victorious. Although gtranslate has clearly done a better job here, I think I would prefer Deepl’s confusion, prompting me to rethink what I’d written, so I’m reluctantly awarding it the laurels here.
“A mãe teve depressão pós-pato desde o nascimento do beber.”
Postpartum depression is missing an r and bebé has gained one.
Deepl helpfully produces surreal results on the first mistake but annoyingly airbrushes out the second. Gtranslate unhelpfully takes the first error in its stride but does a better job of highlighting the second. It also provides a suggested correction in which it suggests a spelling change, so between its two parts of its reply it has correctly flagged both errors.
Result: Gtranslate wins another round.
“O meu irmã está a assustar a um espectáculo”
Irmã is feminine and the “o meu” should match. The verb should be assistir, not assustar
Deepl is reliving childhood trauma. Well, that’s fine, at least it acknowledges something is wrong. Gtranslate keeps a level head, correctly mistranslates the word that is incorrect. It also offers a suggestion to harmonise the gender of irmã.
Result: Gtranslate is a clear winner since it gives a far more precise indication of what’s wrong without peeing in its pants.
Conclusion
As I said at the beginning, Deepl remains the best for English-Portuguese translation, but as the results show, in most cases, Gtranslate is better for reverse-translation in situations where you want to check your own written portuguese.
I was surprised by the results. I was expecting Deepl to be more accomplished at working around errors. It was far more hit and miss than that, but it’s undeniable in most cases that what Gtranslate offers is much more useful than what Deepl offers. You’re much more likely to be able to fix your errors that way.
Remember, this isn’t going to be enough on its own. My process is usually:
Read the text and correct obvious errors.
Paste into Gtranslate, correct what it mistranslates.
Paste into FLiP to check for syntactical errors. FLiP has its blind spots and will occasionally flag a valid word, but by and large it’s helpful.
Show to a teacher and/or post it here and wait for someone to tell me i have 38 more errors to fix.
Luso 