Category: English

Posted in English

New Year, New Uwu

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Feliz Ano Novo, fellow slaves to the grammar. May 2023 bring us all the linguistic wins we so richly deserve!

We were in France for the new year. France is a country to the south of us where they speak a language that’s a bit like portuguese but not as good. We’ve only been here a couple of days to see in the new year and it has been lovely, but we’re waiting for the Eurostar to take us home. The announcer has just told us that owing to the bad weather, the platform is slippery and “please take special care of it”, which I just find delightful, imagining myself tucking the platform into bed, giving it some camomile tea and a foot massage and tiptoeing out of the room. Aww, so cute!

As usual, it’s hard work, communicating in French. I used to be reasonably fluent so long as the conversation didn’t get too heavy. Now, every time I open my mouth, portuguese verbs elbow their way to the front of my tongue, shoving French conjugations out of the way. Sometimes I can get pretty far into crazy mishmashes of the two and it leaves me feeling a bit awkward. My daughter is better but she is a bit self-conscious too. She does a great job in what she plans to say but doesn’t like to speak spontaneously. We have a competition of who can go longest without “getting Englished” – in other words, making the person we’re speaking to just start speaking to us in our own language because it’s easier.

There’s no reason to be self-conscious though. Speaking someone else’s language is absolutely a compliment to them. It shows you’ve made an effort, and it’s basically always appreciated, whereas just launching into English is arrogant and douchey, so just go for it, and if it doesn’t work out, well, no worries, try again. What’s the worst that can happen? Well, short of picking the wrong words and accidentally buying twitter or divulging your location to the Romanian police, the worst most people can imagine is being laughed at. Is that really likely though? Would you ever laugh at someone from overseas speaking your language? And even if someone laughs, is it going to be malicious laughter? Again, it seems unlikely. Sometimes you might just trigger someone’s delighted reaction at an odd combination of words, like the French train announcer who’s concerned about the wellbeing of the platform, but that’s ok. Keep a sense of humour about it, and you’re all good.

Posted in English

Soa

Posted on by Colin Lusk
Soa on Netflix

Acabo de ver um filme chamado Soa. É um dos filmes portugueses na Netflix portanto achei que seria fixe e também um bom método de praticar ouvir português. É um documentário que fala sobre o papel do som na vida do planeta e de nós, os habitantes.

Basicamente, acabei por desistir, desiludido. Embora o filme fosse português, a maior parte dos participantes eram anglófonos e havia também alguns japoneses, alemães e espanhóis.

Ainda por cima, não achei o argumento muito interessante. Não me agarrou a atenção. Não o recomendo.

Posted in English, Portuguese

Óculos

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I used this text to ask a question about a book I’m reading. It’s about the difference between “seu” and “dele” – which are both ways of expressing possession but they’re used slightly differently. Thanks to Butt Roidholds for the correction and to the assembled Reddit multitudes for the answers.

Será que alguém me* pode ajudar? Estou a ler um livro, no qual o protagonista fica obcecado com um músico que se chama Luís Stockman. Na página 91, vai a uma sala de concertos à espera de falar com o Stockman e tem no seu bolso os óculos dele (que foram perdidos num outro concerto e que o protagonista conseguira obter).

Descrevendo a aparência do Stockman o autor diz: “Reparou que tinha uns óculos novos, de armação mais grossa do que a dos seus (ou, no fundo, dos dele), e um cachecol preto em volta do pescoço.”

Custa-me compreender esta frase. Entendo todas as palavras, sem problema, mas o qual é o significado dos parênteses? A diferença entes “dos seus” e “dos dele” neste contexto?

*”que” is attractive so the pronoun has to go first

So I get the general point of “seu” (meaning his, her or its) and dele being a way of saying “of him”. The first one changes with the gender of the owned object (becoming sua for feminine objects), whereas the second changes with the gender of the owner, (becoming dela if it relates to a woman or a girl, say) so it can be useful for making an ambiguous sentence clearer. If a man and a womam go somewhere to get her in “seu carro”, whose car is it, but if its OK “o carro dela” Then you know its the woman’s car.

This one is a little weirder because there no gender problem to untangle but nonetheless the author is trying to be emphatic. He’s saying “He noticed he was wearing new glasses, the frames of which were thicker than his (or rather, of him) and a scarf around his neck.”

Opinion seems to be that it was just underlining the fact that he was referring to the original subject of the sentence – ie, Stockman, not the protagonist.

More about seu and dele on Ciberduvidas

Posted in English, Portuguese

Bandeiras e Mapas

Posted on by Colin Lusk
The Flag of Bahrain in Portuguese
Here Comes Bahrain Again, Falling I’m My Head Like A Memory

Ando a jogar “Quiz de Geografia” porque quero saber mais sobre as bandeiras do mundo, mas a língua padrão do meu telemóvel é PT-PT, portanto os nomes dos países têm de ser escritos em português também. É um ótimo método para aprender os nomes portugueses de vários países pequenos que ainda não sei porque raramente penso neles, tal como “Quirguistão”, “Camboja” e “França”.

The name of the app is “Quiz de Geografia” in my phone but I have all its settings in portuguese (as discussed here) so it might present as something else if you haven’t taken this gung-ho approach. As with many things, names of countries and capitals are subject to orthographic reform…

Posted in English

Easy as ABC

Posted on by Colin Lusk

False friends are always fun to deal with, and I saw a pretty good example today in a social media post by a Brazilian who was trying to translate “Fui alfabetizado nos Estados Unidos” into English. Obviously as an English speaker, you automatically try and englishify it as “I was alphabetised in the United States”, imagining João arriving at the airport and being placed in an ordered list between Joana and Joaquim.

It’s a lovely image but no, it’s not that, obviously. Alfabetizar means to teach literacy – so he was taught to read and write in the United States. It’s not a very common word, but you’ll see a related adjective – analfabeto (illiterate) – quite often when people are criticising each other’s poor grammar online so hopefully it won’t be that hard to remember.

And are you ready for the word to use when you need to put your words in alphabetical order? It’s “alfabetar” without the iz. So not that different, but you probably want to keep them straight in your head or you’ll get funny looks when you explain to someone that you have been procrastinating from study by teaching your CDs to read. In fact, if they’re under 25 you night have to explain to them what a CD is first.

Posted in English

Desenrascar

Posted on by Colin Lusk

So I decided to dig into this word, desenrascar, found in the book I’m reading. Desenrascar means untangle, and desenroscar is more like uncoil, whereas and you can get the meanings of rasca and rosca respectively from the verbs. Desenrascar also seems to mean to sort something out in general resolve a problem.

Trying to understand this, I came across a site in which someone said this was the best English explanation of “o nosso povo (…) ao mesmo tempo desenrascado e forreta”

I tend to steer clear of the portuguese kids, partly because they don’t sing in portuguese but mostly because Americans can sometimes be a bit cringe when they’re too attached to the old country. Witness how chicagoans die their river green for St Patrick’s day, for example.

But anyway, there you go. They are big on doing stuff for themselves and desenrascar seems to be a key word there.

Incidentally, the only other time I’ve seen that word Berbicacho is in the title of a Deolinda song, which I mentioned a couple of years ago in a post about Viriatus.

Posted in English

Cats vs Dogs

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Spotted on twitter and laughed my head off.

I think it’s Brazilian, by the way. Not that different though. I think in european portuguese they would have dropped the “eu” in the first cat dialogue and used cão in place of cachorro. Obviously the punctuation is all over the place but that’s memes for you!

Posted in English

Desafogadamente

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I came across this word today and was strangely pleased by it. The root of it is the verb “afogar” whose main meanings are “to drown” or “to submerge”, but which has some related meanings which go along the lines of “to impede” or “to choke”, both of which make sense: you can imagine how being impeded or stifled might feel, figuratively, like being immersed in water, of how being choked or strangled would deprive you of breath just as surely as being drowned would.

So building on “afogar”, or rather its past participal “afogado” we’ve got the prefix “des” making it negative and the suffix “mente” making it an adverb, and we end up with “desafogadamente”, which you could literally render as “undrownedly”, but seems to be used to mean something like “freely” or “without hindrance”. Excellent stuff! Definitely using that at the next chance I get!

Affogato
Affogato (image courtesy of Leva Kisunaite)

Afogar is quite an easy verb to remember if you’re a fan of delicious Italian treats because you’ve probably come across an affogato. If you don’t know it, it’s a dessert consisting of a scoop of vanilla ice cream with coffee poured over it. This combination of cold and creamy with hot and bitter is literally “affogato al café” or “drowned in coffee” and it’s the same word, just italianified.