My many thousands of followers…
*tumbleweeds*
…might be interested to read this discussion on iTalki about a proposed split between Brazilian and Portuguese Portuguese on iTalki.
Category: English
Hurrah!
Conjuga-me is back. I’m so happy! I couldn’t be doing with that other conjugation site!
Taking Over My Digital Life
I replaced my phone recently and did the setup in Portuguese right from the start so now EVERYTHING is in Portuguese. I have been getting messages all day with “Sex” in the title today, not because the Portuguese Android platform is more vulnerable to spam but because Sex is short for Sexta-Feira (Friday).
Meanwhile, on the ipod, all my carefully categorised music tracks are being retagged. Each time I play a track with a category that itunes understands it gets translated, so gradually all my Comedy section is becoming Comédia, Soundtracks are becoming Banda Sonora, and so on. Luckily, Rock is Rock in any language. My god, that would make a great album title.
Practice Portuguese
Contrary to what I said a while ago, it seems Joel Rendall and Rui Coimbra are still in business. It’s just that my iTunes has been having a funny turn and failing to get new episodes. They are producing new podcasts once a month, with (for paying members) transcriptions and vocab guides. I decided I’d go ahead and subscribe after all since – although one a month isn’t much – there is a whole back catalogue of good quality, and actually quite funny material on the site that you get access to when you subscribe.
Their website is here if you want to go and have a look.
#IGLC
I’m enjoying the Instagram Language Challenge at the moment. There aren’t many people playing but I love a good challenge, me.
You can see the current entries here and the list of daily themes is here.
I’m 18ck on instagram and my favourite entry so far has been this one on the theme of “flag”. Bandeira is Portuguese for “flag” and for me it’s just a hop and a skip from there to punland.
Esta é a tua escova de dentes?
Acabei de ouvir um podcast. Um dos falantes disse “os idiomas são como as escovas de dentes: nunca deve de ter alguma na sua boca com excepção da sua”.
Não concordo com isto!
The original quote was something like “Languages are like toothbrushes. You should never have one in your mouth unless it’s your own” and it was on the Start the Week Podcast on Language and Reinvention.
My last sentence was originally “Não concordo consigo” which in my mind means “I don’t agree with him” but everyone who looked at it wanted it changed to “contigo” (with you… what????) or “com isso” (with that). To be honest, I’m not absolutely sure why it’s wrong, still. There are complicating factors: Portuguese (especially european portuguese) seems to be violently averse to pronouns, which doesn’t help, and also consigo can mean either “with him” or “I can” depending on the context. Maybe later I will understand what I did wrong but for now, best just change it to “Com isso” and be done with it.
The Shape of Verbs to Come
I wrote a question on italki about whether or not there is a Portuguese equivalent of the English verb “to Google”. “Googlar” would be the likely form, I suppose. So far, nobody recognises it beyond the phrase “dar um google”.
Interestingly, I typed “googlar” into Google translate and it knew *exactly* what I meant so, Portugal and Brasil, even if you aren’t using it as a full verb yet, I think Google has plans that you will soon! ;^)
Concordância
I am becoming increasingly obsessed with Deolinda. There’s just something intoxicating about understanding a song in another language. I cottoned on to one called “Concordância“, which seems to be about grammar. Intrigued, I went looking for a translation but there wasn’t one. So I sat down and I wrote one. As it turns out, it’s quite witty. She starts with “I am a pronoun, a personal pronoun” and goes on to state what she wants from this man who is trying to subsume her into a nós. She demands “complementos diretos” which are both direct objects and also have the double meaning of complements that we use in english. “Nome” also means both “noun” and “name” and of course adjectives change depending on the noun, so you can see there’s stuff going on here that probably has more resonance if you’ve been taught Portuguese grammar at a Portuguese school.
There’s a website called lyricstranslate where people can post lyrics and others can translate them so I submitted one for Concordância and you can read it here if you’re so inclined.
Through the Looking Glass
This morning I stumbled on a series of videos by someone calling herself Marianareads on Youtube, about reading books in English. On closer inspection, it seems she is Brazilian rather than Portuguese, which put me off slightly, and also she seems to have a thing for vampires. She seems very enthusiastic and her massive subscriber list means she must be doing something right, but she’s not for me, so I moved along. Youtube then spent some time trying to interest me in a whole string of brasileiras novas, before I finally hit paydirt in the form of an actual, 100% authentic Portuguese vlogger, discussing easy books for Portuguese readers to improve their English vocabulary. This seemed interesting to me because of course it’s the inverse of what I’ve been doing in some of my posts on here.
Intrigued?
Little House of Books on “Wonder” (which I’ve read) and “A Monster Calls” (which I haven’t read yet and… what’s Portuguese for “Spoiler Alert”? *googles* “alerta de spoiler”, apparently) and some others
Diário da Chris on “A Christmas Carol” (Alerta de Spoiler: he gets a bit nicer at the end) “Wonder” again and “The Fault in our Stars”, to name but three
ACromaDosLivros – I’m not sure but from previous linguistic detective work, I think “Croma” or “Cromo” means nerd, so this must be “the book nerd”. I think. The first video of hers I watched was about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night Time though, so she’s got good taste.
The Sound and the Fury
I mentioned in a previous post that the Portuguese seem to use “Tiquetaque” in place of “Tick Tock”. This made me dig out my old Astérix comics and check out the sounds made by people and things during the course of a story
.
Here’s the one I remember best ->
So apparently Portuguese roosters say “Cocorocóóóóó” instead of “Cockadoodledooo!” I think this is much cooler. There’s a Portuguese family who have a rooster that crows in the allotment behind the rowing club I’m a member of and now I’ll be able to address him in his own language.
Dogs, I’m less sure of. Dogmatix is called Ideiafix in Portuguese (Asterix character names, on their own, are probably a subject for a blog post for someone with more linguistic skillz than I have now). In the books I have, the only noise he makes is “CAiMM!” but that sounds more like a yelp than a bark. I googled it and apparently the more conventional dog noise is “Au Au”. OK, I can believe that.
Moving on to inanimate objects, how about knocking on a door?
“Truz Truz Truz” is apparently le mot juste. That’s just bizarre though. Are we sure that’s really knocking? Maybe Cacafonix (Cacofonix) is playing his harp outside the door? 
Well no, I promise you, that’s knocking and anyway Cacofonix’s harp goes TZOIN (or is there a last letter there? I can’t see because it’s cut off by the edge of the panel. It looks like a rounded letter so I want to make it “TZOING” but I think that’s just my English prejudice coming through to make it as much like “Twang” as I can possibly manage. TZOINO? Ach, who knows.
This one, at least, looks familiar. The crac(k) of a tree as it is pulled down by slaves
And here, the pathos of the Roman centurion reduced to tears
The trouble with Astérix, though, is that you’re never quite sure what is a survival from the original French or perhaps something that the translators made up…
For a more cerebral look at the sounds made by animals in different languages, try this article in the Guardian
Luso 