…using this graphic as a sort of site icon. It reminded me of something though, and I couldn’t think what. Then it clicked: the name Portugal doesn’t come from the Arabic word for orange at all, no matter what I said last week. It’s clearly a corruption of “Pokeball”
Category: English
AmErrorca’s Most Wanted
There are a few really stubborn mistakes I just can’t seem to get past. They crop up again and again, and I never get around to addressing them because they are boring and too obscure to be easily addressed by googling “How to do ____ in Portuguese”. I think if I could sort them out a lot of the baseline problems with my sentence-construction would be sorted and I’d be a much stronger speaker.
Little Fiddly Words In Front of Infinitives
Infinitives are the definitive forms of a verb, normally translated as “to be”, “to know”, “to do” and so on. Because of this, when I write one in portuguese I expect it to not need anything in front of it but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. About the only rules here are to do with Gostar and Precisar, each of which takes a “de” after it
Ter can have a “que” or a “de”, depending what you’re doing and in other cases it might have an “a”, a “para” or just nothing. I need to get to the bottom of this and work out how it works once and for all.
Genders of Nouns
I think I’m right about 80% of the time but that’s not enough. Difficult to think how to do this without biting the bullet and learning them by rote. I considered making little stickers with lipstick on some and a moustache on others and sticking them on all the objects in my house, but that wouldn’t help me with abstract nouns. Have you ever tried sticking a moustache on despair?
Reflexive and Pseudo-Reflexive Verbs
First of all: there seem to be a hell of a lot of reflexive verbs – far more than in french – and I sometimes come across verbs that look like they have a reflexive pronoun but aren’t actually reflexive. They seem to be something to do with the passive voice – e.g. sabe-se que = “it is known that…” and yet my grammar book doesn’t show that as a way of constructing the passive voice. This sounds like one I will have to ask a teacher about.
Awkward Irregular Verbs
Things like Ser, Ir and Estar are easy because they get so much attention. The real killers are things like Dar, Pôr and of course the terrible twins, ver and vir, because they irregular and fairly common but not so common that you get a real familiarity with them day-to-day. I printed these buggers out ages ago, thinking I would just bruteforce it all into my head but somehow, whenever I think about it, there always seems to be something more pressing like picking fluff of the carpet with my bare hands, arranging my socks alphabetically or playing the national anthem on the teeth of a comb. Important stuff, you know.
So that’s what I’ll be working on this week in addition to my Hot Summer Reading. I’ll probably write blog posts about some of them as a way of motivating myself and getting them to stick.
New Look
Mixed feelings about this new site template, TBH. Don’t get too used to it because it might go away again soon…
—update—-
Ooh, now this is more like it, I could get used to this!
Hot Summer Reading
In my effort to step up my language learning and get it on a war footing again (only about two months left till the exams FFS!) I have joined a reading challenge called Hot Summer Reading, which is run by a book blogger I follow. I feel slightly out of place in it since the other participants all seem to be young, portuguese book bloggers who arrange their beautifully-colourful books like displays of fruit, and Instagram them to near perfection. My entries are a bit dingy by comparison. The idea is I’ll read two Portuguese books (“O Principezinho” and “O Mandarim”) and one in English (“The Puppet”) and at the end I’ll write a post or record a youtube video, describing them all, in Portuguese, of course.
There are some other challenges but I’m not sure I can fit those in on top of everything else. They mainly consist of making lists of favourite books, but since I’ve only read a handful of Portuguese books I don’t have much to say about those and it seems a bit obtuse to recommend a long list of books in English to a group of portuguese people, so I’ll just stick with doing it in my own way.
O Tyler Joseph E Eu
I wrote a narrative version of our adventures at Reading Festival on iTalki because it seemed to have more potential than just the bitty account I published yesterday. My daughter wanted an English version so I’m going to do alternate sentences, Portuguese, English, Portuguese, English.
Hi lovely. I hope you like it. It’s quite hard to be funny and interesting in a language I don’t speak well, but I tried!
So here we go…
Fomos ontem a um festival de musica.
Yesterday we went to a music festival
Tweetei “ao vivo” durante o dia inteiro em Português para praticar.
I tweeted live in portuguese all day for practice
O festival se chama Reading Festival porque fica numa cidade que se chama Reading, mas “Reading” significa “a ler” ou “leitura” e por isso usei o hashtag #festivalDaLeitura apesar do facto de que não tem nada a ver com livros.
The festival is called Reading Festival because it’s in a town called Reading, but “Reading” is the English equivalent of the portuguese words “lendo” or “leitura” (Portuguese words for reading!) so I used the hashtag #festivalDaLeitura even though it has nothing to do with books!
A minha esposa ficou confusa por isso.
My wife was confused by that
Porque é que um homem de 47 anos foi a uma festival para jovens de quinze a vinte-e cinco anos?
So why is it that a 47-year old man went to a festival for 15 to 25-year-old youngsters?
Fui com a minha filha.
Well, I went with my daughter
Ela tem onze anos – mais nova do que a média da idade duma pessoa no festival, mas é uma fã da banda Twentyøne Piløts (vinte-e-um piløtøs).
She is eleven – younger than the average age of someone at the festival but she is a fan of the band Twentyøne Piløts
Esta banda estava programada para às vinte-e-um menos dez.
This band was scheduled to play at 8.50PM
Conduzimos até ao festival na manhã e passamos o dia a explorar a arena.
We drove to the festival in the morning and spent the day exploring the arena
O Sol brilhava e o dia estava quente.
The sun shone and the day was warm.
Ouvimos várias bandas novas: Creeper, Lower Than Atlantis, Citizen, Neighbourhood, Dinosaur Pile-up.
We saw some new bands: Creeper, Lower Than Atlantis, Citizen, Neighbourhood, Dinosaur Pile-up
A experiência foi muito divertida.
The experience was really fun
Quando o relógio aproximou-se da hora de jantar, fomos para a tenda do NME onde os 21 Pilots iam tocar.
When the clock was nearing dinner time, we went to the NME tent where 21 Pilots were going to play
Chegamos muito cedo para tentar encontrar um bom sítio para ver o palco.
We arrived very early to try and find a good place to see the stage
Foi difícil, porque existiam muitos idiotas altos que empurraram em frente de nós, mas no afinal achamos um lugar perfeito.
It was difficult because there were a lot of tall idiots who pushed in front of us but finally we found the perfect place.
Sabes os Twentyøne Piløts?
Do you know Twentyøne Piløts (Yes, I know my one English reader does!)
São bué fixe!
They’re so cool!
Quando chegaram ao palco todas as fãs gritaram e fizeram um grande barulho.
When they arrived on stage all the fans screamed and made a big noise
A música começou e dançamos, saltamos, e cantamos muito fortemente.
The music started and we danced and jumped and sang really loudly
Eles tocaram as músicas mais conhecidas, e enquanto que tocaram, fizeram muitas acrobacias loucas.
They played their best-known songs and while they were playing they did loads of crazy stunts (I don’t know how to say “hamster-ball” in Portuguese)
Depois do concerto, regressamos a casa.
After the concert we went home.
Ouvimos mais tarde que durante uma acrobacia o cantador, o Tyler Joseph, foi vitima dum assalto, mas achamos que a historia foi exagerada.
We heard later that during one of the stunts, the singer, Tyler Joseph had been the victim of an assault but we think the story was exaggerated
Caiu sobre um grupo de fãs, perdeu um sapato e a sua t-shirt. foi rasgada.
He fell on top of a group of fans, lost a shoe and his t-shirt was ripped (I don’t know how to say “ski mask” in Portuguese)
Alguns fãs ficaram bêbados mas não havia uma atmosfera nada má.
Some fans were drunk but there wasn’t a bad atmosphere.
Actually, that last sentence understates it – the atmosphere was amazing and the weird backlash from fans online has been a bit surreal to watch. I had someone ALLCAPS ME because I had been near the moshpit so he thought I was one of the villains who had done the deed.
Anyway, that’s my story. If two blog posts weren’t enough and you want to know more about these smol beans there’s another eyewitness account of the crime here written by my daughter, who has employed much higher journalistic standards in her account and is able to supply far more detail.
Portugal Is Not The Only Fruit
I saw something really interesting online the other day. Someone shared a link from imgur showing all the different words used for “orange” in languages in and around Europe.
The word for the fruit “orange” in various European languages
Notice anything? I’m looking at the green ones, mainly. These are countries with strong Arabic influences or strong Greek ones. And… They all seem to be close variants of “Portugal”. This aroused my curiosity, so I did what any self-respecting inhabitant of the twenty-first century would do: I looked it up on Wikipedia.
According to this section, the origin of the name of the country is from the Latin “Portus Cale” – the port of Cale, where Cale is probably a Celtic name for something-or-other. It evolved into Portugal between the seventh and ninth centuries when the country had been conquered by an Arabic-speaking army and was part of the land known as الأندلس (Al-Andalus). I can’t help feeling like the similarity of “Portus Cale” to their word for a small fruit might have influenced the colonists’ pronunciation of the name of their new possession. Citrus fruits do grow in the area, so maybe if there were a lot of orange groves around it might have been a pretty good fit to call it the orange region. A few centuries later, after the reconquista rolled back the invaders, the name lives on. A place named after orange groves isn’t far-fetched. Orange County in California got its name the same way, although California hasn’t been conquered by Muslims, whatever Donald Trump might tell you.
I have absolutely no idea if there’s any truth in this. Fact-checking was never my strong point. It would be an odd linguistic legacy. Portuguese does have some inheritances from Arabic (there’s a list here if you’re interested) but their word for Orange (“laranja”) não é um deles. And yet, it just seems too… well, too right.
Two Become One
So the other day, my wife was reading the Observer to maintain our impeccable middle-class credentials, when she showed me a full-page graphic in which the headline “Why two languages are better than one” is written in several different languages, including Portuguese.
“Do you see a problem?” she asked, and I’m happy to say that, yes, it jumped out at me straight away. It turned out to be quite educational. Stay awhile and read the next few paragraphs and I will lift the lid on the whole sorry affair.
To further burnish those impeccable middle-class credentials I mentioned, I decided to take a picture of the page and tweet about it in a slightly smarmy way. I also mentioned it to a couple of other people – a Portuguese friend on Hellotalk and an online tutor. To my surprise, both of them thought the sentence was absolutely fine and error-free. Well, what was I to do? How could I break the news to Mrs L that she had been outvoted? I asked a different tutor and she initially joined the “No, it’s fine” crowd, but then after thinking about it agreed that it was a mistake. Two all. Mrs Lusk then started pinging it out to people she was at school with – people in their forties who went to school before the Acordo Ortográfico when it all got a bit slack. At last the balance of opinion shifted decisively in favour of it being a mistake and her faith in humanity was restored.
So what was the problem? Well, my Portuguese is pretty feeble, but let me have a stab at describing what I think is going on and why it wasn’t obvious whether or not there was an error. Basically, the problem is the mismatch between
são + melhor
in the middle there. “São” is third person plural but “melhor” is singular. There are two languages so it looks like it ought to be “melhores”.
That’s as far as I had got when I was smarmily tweeting at the Observer, but I’m not even sure “sao melhores” is right either. What does the adjective describe? Not the languages themselves surely? That would be like hearing the sentence
Why two languages are better than one
and parsing it as
Why two languages are both better than this other language
That makes a sort of sense but what we’re really interested in is not the languages themselves but a person’s ability to speak the two languages. There’s a word missing:
Why speaking two languages is better than speaking one
Now it makes more sense because here “speaking” is a gerund – a present participle used as a noun. If you add the gerund back in it’s obvious what we’re actually talking about here. The adjective and the verb now refer to “speaking” so they can go back to being singular again and we can make another version of the sentence.
OK, here goes – I’m really putting my neck on the line here. If I muck this up after this much build-up I’m going to look a right tit:
Porque falar duas línguas é melhor do que falar uma
If this were Brazilian portuguese we would use a portuguese gerund (“falando”) but European Portuguese seems to prefer infinitivos (“falar”) in these kinds of situation. Apart from that… I think this is better, but if it’s not you can have a good laugh at me in the comments box below this post.
This kind of thing isn’t just a portuguese problem of course. We’ve all heard English-speakers mangling sentences because they haven’t really thought about what the words mean. Me, I always get muddled up with collective nouns. Do you say “a small group of bankers are destroying the economy” because there are multiple bankers, or “a small group of bankers is destroying the country” because there’s only one group. So it doesn’t really surprise me that there are sentences like this that can trip up perfectly intelligent portuguese people. I’ll just note it down as an interesting artefact I’ve come across on the road to fluency.
Key Learnings 5 – Gender Rannygazoo
I haven’t blug for a while. Blug is the past tense of blog, right? Anyway, while I have been in silent mode, I’ve been involved in a group discussion on Hellotalk run by a Portuguese friend. There are a few Portuguese-learners in there and it’s interesting to see how the conversation evolves.
Now, normally, I mention my own failings in conversation, but in this case, someone else made a mistake that I thought was really interesting and I definitely would have made it too if I’d been trying to say the same thing, so I’m writing about it to help cement the knowledge in my brain. What he said was
Eu tenho dupla nacionalidade, Americano e Português
The correction came back as
Eu tenho dupla nacionalidade, Americana e Portuguesa
Weird. He’s a bloke, so why is it “Americana” and not “Americano”? Well, the answer is that nacionalidade is a noun in its own right and the way the sentence is structured, it’s his nationality that is described as American, not him. Since nacionalidade is feminine, it becomes “Americana”. If he had said
Eu tenho dupla nacionalidade. Sou Americano e Português
that would have been OK, because in that sentence the adjective is applied to him directly. I was taken aback at first, because we anglophones are so used to not having to think about this stuff, but when you think about it, it makes sense, and opens up a little window into how the language works.
Língua Dos Pês
I mentioned a little while ago that I was intrigued by a Luisa Sobral song called “Língua Dos Pês”, which means “The Language of Ps” or if you prefer “P Language”. As it turns out, this is a song with a back-story. It’s a made-up language, similar to the Pig Latin or Egg-language (aka Eggy-Peggy or Egglish) that you might be familiar with if you went to the right school. It isn’t a proper language or even a secret code, more of a language game you can play just for the fun of it.
Like everything else in Portuguese, it has a European and a Brazilian variant. As you know, this blog is fully on-side with Europe, so we’ll stick to that. Basically, all you need to do is repeat each syllable of each word, but with a P at the start, either before the vowel or in place of the consonant. So for example the name of Luisa’s album is also her first name, Luisa, which, in Língua dos Pês is Lu–Pu–I–Pi–Sa–Pa.
It sounds quite nice in Portuguese:
da-pa ten-pen-ta-pa-ção-pão son-pon-o-po-ra-pa de-pe u-pu-ma-pa me-pe-tá-pá-for-por-a-pa*
which is why she is able to sing a song in it, but it’s awkward in English:
He-pe-llo-po My-py name-pame is-pis Col-pol-in-pin
and similarly, eggy-peggy sounds like a disaster in Portuguese
Peggor eggexeggempleggo eggestegga freggasegge
And it gets worse if you use the actual Portuguese word for egg:
Povoor ovoexovoemplovoo ovoestovoa frovoasovoe
Geggood legguck preggoneggouncegging theggat!
It’s interesting that certain types of language game suit specific languages better than others, although I admit I don’t know quite what it means.
OK, are you ready to look at that video again? Well, the one I posted last time, from the children’s TV show “Panda and Friends” was pretty toe-curling, but there’s a much better version here in an an interview with O Observador. She talks a bit about the track and the album in general, then starts singing Língua Dos Pês at about 5:42 and carries on with “Onde Foi o Avô?” (“Where did Grandpa go?”) and her single “João”.
If you need any help, there’s a translation of the song here but only into straightforward Portuguese. You’ll have to do the rest yourself!
Further reading:
Wikipedia Page about Língua dos Pês, with various dialects (includes links to other similar dialects in other languages)
The Brazilian equivalent if you’re interested is called Língua do P.
*=this is a line from a poem by José Jorge Letria. I heard it on a podcast and didn’t understand the whole thing but picked out “A poem born of an impulse, of a fever… of the sonorous temptation of a metaphor” early on. Ooh yeah, more of that please!
A Standing Start
I’m pretty good at Portuguese. I mean, I’m not a great linguist like Nigel Farage with his wine list, but I’m OK on a good day. So why is it that I still can’t seem to just start a conversation from scratch? I met a Portuguese lady the other day near my house and decided to do what all the famous internet polyglots do and start talking to her, but I hadn’t warmed up by thinking in Portuguese beforehand so, translated into english, the exchange went like this:
ARE YOU PORTUGUESE?
GOOD MORNING*!
I CALL MYSELF COLIN
I AM FROM OVER THERE!
…
…
…
BYE
There was some nervous laughter in between and she tried to look sympathetic to my attempts but it was basically just me broadcasting my own hopelessness. This is a pretty good example of how it’s always a good idea to do some practice to get your brain in gear before having a conversation. This is doubly true if you have an exam: never go in cold. It’ll be much harder.
*=It was 8.30PM
Luso 