My daughter is currently obsessed with the new Disney Film, Encanto, so she’s listening to different language versions of the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”. There are a couple of Portuguese versions of it, but of course Brazilian Portuguese is usually more common. This is the European version (lyrics only, from the official accounts so as not to risk them dropping of YouTube before you see this)
And the Brazilian
You can have fun spotting the differences between them. Just a quick warning though, in case you haven’t seem the film, it’s about a Colombian family and even the English version has Spanish words in it. They probably blend in better in Portuguese, but “Mi Vida” is Spanish for example. The noun sounds like Portuguese but the possessive pronoun gives it away; and Abuela isn’t a name, it’s Spanish for Avó. Those are the only ones I can remember off the top of my head but I might be missing one of two, so keep your wits about you.
No it isn’t a Massive Attack song, or a river in Cleveland, it’s a follow-up to my last post about yoga/ioga (both spellings seem to be used). Big thanks to Paul who replied directly. I asked some folks on reddit too and these seem to be the available options:
RTP Play’s #fitemcasa was Paul’s suggestion and I don’t know why I didn’t think of looking at this sooner, honestly! The sound quality isn’t as good as you’d expect from a national broadcaster, but I guess it was made in the early days of the acovolypse so it’s probably not that surprising that they hadn’t got their act together yet.
LiDL (yes, remember them?) have a few yoga workouts in their lockdown workout section, led by Filippa Barros, who I believe is a basketball player.
But those seem to be about the only free ones. Of course, a lot of instructors who used to do only in-person gym classes are now doing online classes, so if you don’t mind paying you could also try
I’m a bit run down at the moment. I exercised a lot last year but my knees are feeling the strain. I also have a sore back and, as is traditional at the start of January, I think I’ve gained a few pounds. I’m going to be doing a basic yoga class to work on mobility and core strength in a relatively non-taxing way. I’m mostly looking at a January 30-day workout that’s been recommended to me but I’d love to find a Portuguese instructor I can follow, just because I’d like to follow along and listen to how they describe the various stretches, muscles and so on. I’ve had a look at a Brazilian Yoga teacher called Pri Leite who has January course and seems down-to-earth in the way she presents. Her course doesn’t start till the tenth though (Whaaat? Who waits till the tenth to start their new year’s resolutions? Most of us are giving up by then!) but if anyone knows of a good Portuguese yoga teacher, I’d love to hear about them!
I keep seeing people write this on twitter. The context is usually a bit iffy, but I can tell its not just a random collection of words thrown together, despite the slightly confusing use of “é” after “eu”.
Apparently, it comes from an old sketch, done by veteran comedian Herman José in which he plays José Severino, a pastry chef who has accidentally been invited onto a talk show to discuss radiography. When it came out – exactly thirty years ago – it was immediately successful and people started saying it to each other, and even now, in 2022, it lives on on social media.
I’m not sure whether making this pun in the week when the anti-apartheid hero died will be taken as offensive, but I needed to write about when to use “tu” in a sentence and the pun was just there waiting to be made and I’m not made of wood, people. I once almost walked into him in… Cambridge, I think, after a group of us made a pilgrimage from Norwich to attend his speech in about um… 1989? He was very good-natured about it.
Anyway, let’s get down to business. Here’s the question I asked yesterday.
Why (according to the C1 course I’m doing) is the word “tu” necessary in this sentence:
Tu vais ter mais experiência de vida. Nessa altura, vais compreender-me.
But absolutely wrong in this sentence, which is my attempt to rewrite the first using different tenses.
Quando tu tiveres mais experiência de vida, vais compreender-me
The gist of the answers I got was that the course’s model answer was wrong, or at least not unambiguously right. Although you don’t need it in the second sentence, you don’t need it in the first either, and since the exercise was to rewrite the sentence, it made sense to retain it if it was already there. The “tu” is superfluous because the conjugation of “vais” and of “tiveres” tells you you’re in the second person singular. If I had been changing “vai ter” into “tiver” then it would have been necessary to add a pronoun (ele or ela, probably) because “tiver” is ambiguous in a way that “vai ter” is not. Sometimes these things are just done on what sounds better so it might have been down to the personal sensibilities of the person setting the questions. It’s not very consistent though. Minor irritation.
Anyway, one of the respondents gave me some feedback that made me swell with pride:
So here is the question in the original Portuguese as a record of the most-praised Portuguese text I have ever written!
Uma das minhas dúvidas recorrentes é quando usar e quando não usar pronomes com verbos. Regra geral, não se usam tanto quanto em inglês mas por exemplo no meu curso, tenho de rescrever a seguinte frase começando com uma palavra específica e fazendo as alterações necessárias:
Q) Tu vais ter mais experiência de vida. Nessa altura, vais compreender-me.
R) Quando ____
Respondi assim:
Quando tu tiveres mais experiência de vida, vais compreender-me
Falhei. A resposta certa é exactamente igual mas tirando o "tu". OK tuga, mas... Porque? Porque é que o "tu" é necessário no modelo mas desnecessário - até errado - na resposta? Ambos exprimem a mesma ideia. Eu sei que a forma de "tiverES" assinala que estamos na segunda pessoa mas isso é igualmente verdade de "vaiS".
Desculpem o tom irritado. É ligeiramente frustrante fazer um curso que não explicam estas coisas. 🤷🏼♂️
Today’s text in the Writestreak subreddit is a masochistic attempt to translate a single sentence from Judith Butler, who is extremely influential these days despite – or rather because of – the convoluted, opaque style in which she buries her ideas. The sentence (which I’ve screenshotted below) won an award for bad writing, so I’m going to suggest the correctors just not bother trying to correct my translation and turn it into good Portuguese. Nobody should do any work in the dead time between Christmas and New Year. I’m just doing this for a laugh, really.
A passagem desde uma conta estruturalista no qual o capital é compreendido a estruturar as relações sociais em modos relativamente homólogos para um uma vista de hegemonia na qual as relações de poder estão sujeitas à repetição, convergência, e rearticulação trouxe a questão de temporalidade dentro do pensamento sobre estrutura e marcou a mudança desde um tipo de teoria Althusseriano que toma totalidades estruturais como objetos teóricos até a um no qual as perspectivas sobre a possibilidade contingente de estrutura inauguram uma concepção renovada de hegemonia como estreitamente ligada com is sítios contingentes e estratégias da rearticulação de poder.
UPDATE 1: there is a copy of the book available on Bertrand so some poor sod actually had to produce a rendition of this sentence for real.
UPDATE 2: the ever-helpful Dani Morgenstern decided to correct it anyway, despite my saying it wasn’t worth the effort. Here’s what she suggested:
A passagem de uma conta estruturalista no qual o capital é compreendido a estruturar as relações sociais em modos relativamente homólogos para um uma vista de hegemonia na qual as relações de poder estão sujeitas à repetição, convergência e rearticulação trouxe a questão da temporalidade para o pensamento sobre estrutura e marcou a mudança desde um tipo de teoria Althusseriano que toma totalidades estruturais como objetos teóricos até a um no qual as perspectivas sobre a possibilidade contingente de estrutura inauguram uma concepção renovada de hegemonia como estreitamente ligada com is sítios contingentes e estratégias da rearticulação de poder.
Well, that’s not so bad. I only added three additional mistakes to this train-wreck.
I spotted this on twitter and was pleased to find that I understood what he was annoyed about
Ai, Público! E será que “habituaremo-nos” a estropiar a língua portuguesa na imprensa, sem que ninguém reveja os textos antes de eles serem publicados? pic.twitter.com/QqfGndGe2j
The headline writer has got in a mix-up between two tenses. He could have gone with the imperative “habituemo-nos” (let’s get used to wearing masks) or made a pronoun sandwich with the future tense “habituar-nos-emos” (we will get used to wearing masks) but he’s instead tried to put the pronoun in the end of the future tense and people are riled up.
Regular readers and grammar nerds might remember the terms for these positions. When the pronoun goes on the end of the verb it’s caller “ênclise” and when it goes in the middle, its called “mesóclise”. The missing third term is próclise, where the pronoun goes before the noun. The rules are set out here if you want some good, solid grammar broccoli for the day.
My epic quest for advanced certification rumbles on, with over. A hundred days behind me, doing daily exercises, writing texts and tweeting. I’ve given myself a break on the reading aspect of this over the difficult few days between Christmas And New Year though because it’s a weird period and I feel like I need a rest and some nonsense so between now and New Year I’ll allow myself some indulgent English language reading.
A few recent texts with corrections below each. These are mostly pretty short since I didn’t want to give the correctors too much work over Christmas
Perder Um Streak.
A minha filha perdeu o seu Streak no Duolingo. Está a aprender francês. Usou o app todos os dias* durante 426 dias, mas esqueceu-se ontem. Eh pá.. Dói-me o coração….
*dammit, another one where I keep mistranslating. For “every day”, I keep writing “cada dia” (each day) when I should write “todos os dias” (all the days)
Feliz Natal.
Votos de um bom Natal** para todos. Espero que o Pai Natal traga tudo que vocês desejam.
**the capital letter is important.
Catolicismo.
Hoje de manhã, abri o Twitter, aquele sítio de opiniões equilibradas e cuidadosamente consideradas e deparei-me num tweet antigo. Uma mulher afirmava “não te podes considerar português não sendo católico”
O tweet é isca, claro, mas fez-me pensar um pouco sobre religião e identidade. O catolicismo constitui uma grande parte da cultura e da história do país (a isca é isca precisamente porque contém um grão de verdade) mas qualquer definição da nacionalidade que não inclua Viriato (de um lado da cronologia) nem Saramago (do outro) é evidentemente limitada de mais.
There was a little discussion in reddit about the influence of Catholicism on Portuguese culture, and how even those who consider themselves anti-catholics are to some extent influenced by it, which is all true, no doubt, but I think the original tweet I’m referring to isn’t saying that: I think she’s specifically trying to assert that any protestants or Muslims or Jews or atheists resident in the country will always be outsiders. In short, I think she was being a bit of an arsehole. To what extent that was pure trollage, or to what extent her tradwife persona is real, I don’t know, but taken on its face, it just seemed obnoxious.
My favourite Trivial Pursuit question at today’s family get together was when my brother asked me “What language is spoken by a Lusophone?” Hm, let me think about that one….
I hope yours was as good, that you had a happy Christmas, and that 2022 will be less of a pain in the bum than the last couple of years.
Luso 