Category: English

Writing this lot out so I remember it.

Plantention

Niche point about the difference between planning to do a thing and intending to do a thing. I recently had an exercise to paraphrase the following snippet

“visa colocar o país”

It’s obviously not a full sentence so it’s a little difficult to do. “Visa” here doesn’t mean a visa you use to get into a country, it’s part of “visar”, which means “aim”, either literally (aiming a weapon) or in the sense of intending or having an objective.

So a good translation would be something like “intends to put the country” (in the original, it was followed by something like “…on a path toward sporting success”). Well, I suppose I was thinking something like that needs a long term strategy, or, if you like, a plan, so the word I used in place of “visa” was “planeia”. That’s not precise enough though. Planear is about the journey to get to your objective, and visar is more to do with your intention.

Better synonyms of visar would have been “pretender”, “tencionar” or “objetivar”

O Papel Absorvente

I also had to come up with a synonym for “o papel absorvente”. You’re obviously supposed to think of aborbent paper like kitchen towel (as opposed to papel higiénico, which is toilet paper), but it’s a trick! Papel can also mean “role”, and in the context “a escola assume um papel muito absorvente na vida deles” (from here) it was saying that school occupied a role in their lives that absorbed a lot of their attention and free time.

Status

I said something about “estado social” intending to say “social status”, but it means “social state”. The word for status is actually “status”, which is weird becuse you don’t get many words in portuguese that start with st-. But there you have it: status social.

Equipa/e

I knew “equipe” was a “francesismo”*, but I was a bit thrown by seeing it used in the wild so I looked up both equipe and equipa in Priberam. The lexicographers haven’t really been very helpful in explaining it, but the TL;DR is that yes, equipa is the preferred spelling. It’s just that the frenchified version is allowed and is sometimes used. I suppose it’s like cafe/café in english. É doesn’t really exist in our alphabet, so cafe is the closest standard english spelling but nobody is going to have an aneurism if you bust out an accent.

Homem Rico vs Rico Homem; Velha Casa vs Casa Velha

Um rico homem seems to mean “a good/valued man” as opposed to just a rich man. It’s the eighth definition on Priberam, although they use it for netos rather than homens. A question on Wordreference Forums refers to a blog (sarcastically?) asking of José Socrates is “um rico homem ou um homem rico” but I can’t find the original.

There’s also an old-fashioned expression “rico-homem“. with a hyphen, which seems to mean a member of the nobility.

Velha casa seems to be more deprecative, meaning outmoded or old fashioned, as opposed to simply old. This meaning of velho is the fourth one in Priberam, but they use it with technology rather than houses. My sense is that this one isn’t as clear-cut. I don’t see many references or explainers, and it’s translated all sorts of ways in Linguee.

*Which sounds like it should mean “earthquake in Paris” but actually just means a word or phrase borrowed from french, just like anglicismo means a word or phrase borrowed from english.