I’ve just put my envelope in the post for my second attempt at acquiring dual citizenship. I’ve been working on it for a while and finally got the form notorised and then the whole lot went to the post office (where the guy helpfully pointed out I’d spelled Lisbon with an A at the end…)
Anyway, it’s been interesting and I’ll have to write more about it on another day but I’m exhausted. I cycled there and back and it’s about twenty miles there and back.
What’s Portuguese for “floof”?
Anyway, I’ll talk about that more when I’ve recovered but in the meantime, here’s a teaser.
The book I’m reading has quite a high incidence of a grammatical structure I’ve always found a bit hard to understand. It just looks like a stray indirect object that doesn’t seem to have much purpose in the sentence.
Tendo também medo de aranhas(…), lhe pareceu senti-las a passarem-lhe pelo corpo
Agarrou-lhe o braço
….O necessário para te limpar a ferida
The third of these looks a bit different because it has “te” instead of “lhe” and it comes before the verb not after (an example of “próclise“) but it’s basically doing the same thing as the lhe in the other two examples. Te and lhe are both indirect objects so they mean “to you” and “to him/her/it” respectively. So if you were to translate the phrases, super-literally into English you’d get absolute monstrosities
Being afraid of spiders too, it seemed as if they passed to her over the body
It grabbed to him the arm
…The things necessary for cleaning to you the injury
There are two unfamiliar things going on here. Firstly, something called “posse inalienável” (inalienable possession) which sounds fancy but it’s not that hard to understand. It just means that the ownership of the object isn’t really in question so you don’t even need to say “my arm”, just “the arm”.
OK, that explains why there’s no possessive pronoun. That’s not the thing I want to focus on today though, so let’s move on to the second point: What’s up with the indirect object? Well, even though you don’t need to say “your arm”, you do still need to say who has been grabbed or cleaned or whatever, so that’s where the indirect object comes in. He grabbed the arm to him. It sounds very weird to anglophone ears but that seems to be what’s going on.
It doesn’t only happen in the context of body parts though. For example, to use an example from the Reddit discussion, “Roubou-me a carteira” is fine, and so are “lê-me um livro” and “faz-me um favor”. Now I don’t know about you, but these three phrases don’t all seem the same to me.
Lê-me um livro = Read me a book. That’s completely fine in English. Read the book TO me – >indirect object
Faz-me um favor =Do me a favour. Also fine. Do the favour FOR me – > indirect object
Roubou-me a carteira is a different kettle of fish though. Treating the indirect object like its English equivalent, I’d translate it as “he stole me the wallet”, implying that I asked someone to steal a wallet on my behalf and they obliged. That’s not how Portuguese works though. Prepositions are all different. It’s legit to say “Roubou a carteira a mim” (He stole the wallet to me). The victim is the recipient of the action even though the thief is the recipient of the wallet. It’s a different way of thinking and I’ll just have to meditate on it a bit and not try and translate it literally in my head.
Another way to look at it would be to think of the indirect object as doing the job of a possessive pronoun. There’s a ciberdúvidas article about this phenomenon here.
I’m struggling a bit with finding the right tenses for some of the sentence structures set out in the C1 course so decided to try and write a few for practice. Thanks to Dani Morgenstern for help with the corrections.
Quando acabei de ler ele já tinha escrito a sequela (when I finished reading he had already written the sequel)
Enquanto ele tocava bateria, eu preenchia os formulários de divórcio (while he was playing drums, I was filling in the divorce forms)
Quando chegares a casa, descasca as batatas (when you get home, peel the potatoes)
Ela disse-me que queria ser primeira ministra quando fosse grande (she told me she wanted to be prime minister when she was big)
Quando o vírus tivesse passado, ela voltava a treinar (when the vírus had passed she went back to training – I think the sense here is of something that happened repeatedly: she’d get ill every so often and go back to training after each occurrence, hence the imperfect tense)
Enquanto não leres o texto não estás capaz de responder às perguntas (since you won’t read the text you won’t be able to answer the questions)
Enquanto os negócios tivessem apoio financeiro não iriam à falência durante a pandemia. (as long as the businesses had financial support, they wouldn’t fail during the pandemic)
Enquanto o tio Rui não tivesse chegado a casa, a família não começava a jantar* (since Uncle Rui hadn’t arrived at the house the family weren’t starting their dinner)
*It’s probably worth pointing out here that this “a” is a preposition and “jantar” a verb. They hadn’t started to dine. But jantar can also be a noun so I could also have said “o jantar” instead of “a jantar” and the sentence would still work but it would mean “they hadn’t started the dinner”.
Logo que o comboio parta, telefona-me (as soon as the train leaves, call me)
Assim que receberes a carta do SNS, marca consulta. (as soon as you get a letter from the SNS, make an appointment)
No momento em que as cortinas se abrissem, a banda comecaria a tocar (as soon as the curtains opened the band would start to play)
Mal tivesse aberto a janela, o pisco entraria na sala (as soon as he had opened the window the robin would enter the room)
Logo que eu acordava tomava um café (as soon as he woke up, he used to have a cup of coffee)
Assim que enviou a carta, percebeu que se tinha esquecido do selo (Just as he posted the letter he realised he’d forgotten the stamp)
No momento em que o professor abriu a boca a campainha tocou (at the instant the teacher opened his mouth the bell rang)
Mal soube as noticias, começou a chorar (As soon as he heard the news he started to cry)
Antes que te esqueças, faz notas sobre a reunião (before you forget make some notes about the meeting)
Antes que ligasse ao meu pai, ele enviou-me uma mensagem (Before I called my dad, he sent me a message)
Antes de abrir a boca vou pensar duas vezes (before I open my mouth I’m going to think twice)
Depois de nos termos encontrado a minha vida era vazio e sem propósito (Before we met each other, my life was empty and without purpose)
I don’t usually get Portuguese ads on Instagram despite the fact that I write a ton of Portuguese on my account. But here we are, two days into new year’s resolution season and I write a blog post about yoga in Portugal on this blog, which is linked to Instagram and what happens?
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.
Luso 