Category: English

Posted in English

Are You Normal?

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I really challenged myself yesterday by participating in a live discussion about whether or not covid has brought about a “New Normal”. Regular readers might remember I tried to join in a workshop about the suffragette movement in Portugal a few weeks back but I got cold feet when I realised I’d have to speak on camera and not just listen. Well, this time, I was better prepared!

People photo created by mego-studio - www.freepik.com
Proposed new design for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

The teacher started out with an introduction and asked us all to write down our personal answer at the outset. Then the format was based on a series of video and audio recordings. She’d show us a different point of view and then we broke into discussion groups to see whether the new angle had changed our minds at all. At the end we summed up by seeing how our opinion had changed over the course of all the stages.

My subgroup consisted of just three people. I started out by apologising to the other two for the fact that my mastery of Portuguese was perhaps a little less than ideal for the level of discussion, and I hoped they wouldn’t mind me tagging along. Amazingly one of them asked would I like them to conduct the discussion in English! I am used to waiters and shop assistants offering this courtesy of course, but the level of generosity in offering to do it in an hour-and-a-half long discussion speaks volumes for how welcoming the Portuguese are to visitors, tourists and immigrants. Imagine some English speakers in the UK making a similar offer to a french guest who dropped in unexpectedly, for example.

I thanked her for the offer but declined of course. Even if I wasn’t trying to gain familiarity with the language, the level of egotism I would need to expect them to go to such trouble would just be off the charts!

I actually managed to hold my own pretty well, I think. I mean, I struggled with some aspects. One of the videos was hard to follow due to the Brazilian accent, and I hadn’t really warmed my brain up beforehand so I wasn’t especially articulate, but that’s OK. I listened to the other participants, tried to give my own opinion (slightly stiltedly) asked a couple of questions, described how my point of view had changed . I didn’t amaze and astound the group with my laser-like insight, but I did OK. I didn’t disgrace myself. I’d class that as a victory of sorts!

If you’d like to be involved, the list of courses is here. Obviously only consider this if you are a confident listener and speaker. I’m at B2 level and I was struggling, so don’t even think about it if you’re a newbie.

Posted in English, Portuguese

Piadas de Tiozão

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Apparently piadas de tiozão (“big uncle jokes) are what Brazilians call dad jokes. Older subscribers who have endured three or more years of this blog (I raise a glass of Licor de Beirão in your honour) may remember that the European equivalent is “Piada Seca“

I inflicted two in the world today.

Como se chama um cantor que tem muita sede?

Justin Beber

Como se chama um cantor que tem um leque e um tambor?

Justin Tamborleque

Posted in English

Portuguese Graphic Novels

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I had been putting together a list of Portuguese Graphic Novels for a while and it’s not quite finished yet but someone just asked a question about it so I’ve gone ahead and published it in draft form along with the other resources. If you’re looking at this on a computer it’ll probably be over on the right, and if you’re on a phone screen, you’ll probably need to scroll down a bit. Or just click here.

The plot thickens though because after I published it I saw a reply from another Redditor (is that what you call them?) with this link to a list of the supposed fifteen best. Some are on my list too, and some I don’t know. I’ve no idea why they have Caos e Ordem on there. I liked the look of that too but it’s a huge disappointment.

Posted in English, Portuguese

Rústica – Florbela Espanca.

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I mentioned a few days ago that I was trying to memorise poems in both English and Portuguese. Well, today’s is a Portuguese one: Rústica by Florbela Espanca. As with so many of these poems, reading it through once a couple of years ago, I was my usual poetry-reading self: “Yes yes, very poetic. Next!” But now that I’m immersing myself in them, I’m starting to get the point of poetry. Here is the original:

Rústica

Ser a moça mais linda do povoado.
Pisar, sempre contente, o mesmo trilho,
Ver descer sobre o ninho aconchegado
A bênção do Senhor em cada filho.

Um vestido de chita bem lavado,
Cheirando a alfazema e a tomilho…
– Com o luar matar a sede ao gado,
Dar às pombas o sol num grão de milho…

Ser pura como a água da cisterna,
Ter confiança numa vida eterna
Quando descer à “terra da verdade”…

Deus, dai-me esta calma, esta pobreza!
Dou por elas meu trono de Princesa,
E todos os meus Reinos de Ansiedade.

Rústica, Florbela Espanca, from Charneca Em Flor

Florbela Espanca

There are a few unfamiliar words in it so I’ll have a go at translating it:

Rustic

To be the prettiest girl in the village
To walk contentedly on the same trail
To see descending on the cosy home*
The blessings of the Lord on every child 

A calico** dress, well-washed
Smelling of lavender*** and thyme 
With the moonshine quenching the thirst of the cattle****
Giving the doves the sun in a grain of corn

To be pure as the water in the cistern
To believe in a life eternal 
When I go down to the land of truth*****

God, give me this calm, the poverty
I’ll give them my princess throne
And all my kingdoms of anxiety

*=The word used in the original is “ninho” which means nest, but I think in this context its just a folksy way of saying home.

**=my paper dictionary says chintz, but I think chintz is made of calico (?) and that calico goes more with the vibe of the poem. But I’m not an expert in cloth, so I could easily be wrong.

***=I’ve been saying “lavandas” for lavender but I think that might be a brazilism because according to the wiki this is the word used in Portugal.

****=matar a sede means kill the thirst, literally, but quench seems better. And it’s not “a sede do gado” (the thirst of the cattle) but ao gado (to the cattle) , another example of Portuguese speakers using prepositions in a way that are just a little different to what an english speaker would expect.

*****=Descer in this sentence is the future subjunctive, not the infinitive, and I believe its “when I go down” not “when he/she/it goes down” but I can only get that from context since there no way of telling grammatically! I’m not sure what the land of truth means here either. If it’s heaven, why is she descending and not ascending? I’ve read the bible and spent a lot of time in church but this makes no sense to me I’m afraid.

Here’s an analysis I wrote of the poem, in Portuguese, for today’s writing challenge (thanks to Dani Morgenstern for the help)

O Poema de hoje é Rústica de Florbela Espanca. O poema fala do anseio da poeta por uma vida mais bucólica, numa aldeia onde ela seja “a moça mais linda” e o ar seja perfumado de ervas e flores.
Este desejo, esta saudade duma vida sem ansiedade e sem problemas é, no entanto, pouco realista porque a vida numa aldeia tem as suas próprias ansiedades e nem todas as moças podem ser a mais linda. Mas isso não contraria a mensagem do poema nem a vontade que todos nós temos de afastar-nos da vida moderna.
O poema tem quatro versos: dois de quatro linhas e dois de três, e tanto quanto sei, este padrão é muito comum na obra desta poeta. Usa imagens da natureza (o que é pouco surpreendente neste caso!) e temas religiosos. Aliás, a religião não é apenas um tema: a saudade da religião faz parte da saudade da vida simples. É como se Deus não tivesse poder nenhum na cidade e só soubesse tocar o coração de quem vive nalguma quinta.

Posted in English

O Verso Alcançando o Infinito

Posted on by Colin Lusk

*groan*

So ages ago, I heard Jose Jorge Letria (a poet who wrote, among other things,”Era Uma Vez Um Cravo”) read a poem called O Dia Mundial da Poesia. I mean, I thought it was called that. I thought he’d written it for world poetry day and he’d called it that because it was about poetry itself, where it comes from and how it’s made. And I spent ages looking for a printed copy because I liked it so much even though my listening skills were terrible and I could only make out about one line in five.

The poem is born of an impulse [… Blah blah blah… ] from the sonorous temptation of a metaphor [… Something something…] Afterwards, it’s writing, the work of hands on the incandescent material of syllables [… Tum ti tum…] The poem is born, finally, from the illusion that there is something left that hasn’t been said [… Etc… ]

I couldn’t catch it all. But I got enough to know I wanted more but I couldn’t find it anywhere online or in any of his books.

Anyway, as you’ve probably gathered by now, it’s not called O Dia Mundial da Poesia at all; it’s called O Verso Alcançando o Infinito. So that explains why I couldn’t find it. Anyway, now I know what to plug into Google, I’ve found another recording of it here…

And if you need the lyrics (I wish I’d had access to then five years ago!) they’re here. Well, some of them are. Another one for my project to learn poetry, I think!

Posted in English

The War on Ter Que-ism

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve seen occasional grammar guides arguing that it’s technically incorrect to use “ter que” to indicate obligation. For example in “101 Erros de Português que Acabam com a Sua Credibilidade” by Elsa Fernandes, she says “Ultimamente tem-se vulgarizado o uso da construção *ter que* para significar obrigação […] os especialistas indicam que, nesse caso, a forma mais correta é ter de.”
This ciberduvidas article makes the same point 

But this morning I was reading through (and trying to memorise) Mar Português by Fernando Pessoa and I noticed it has this couplet

Quem quer passar além do Bojador
Tem que passar além da dor

This looks like the great man is using tem que in exactly the way “os especialistas indicam” is wrong. Borrowing a phrase we sometimes use about Shakespeare, “I’d rather be wrong with Fernando Pessoa than right with Elsa Fernandes”, but I asked on Reddit to see if anyone else had thoughts on what might be going on. After all, the poem also includes an old-fashioned spelling of the words “rezaram” and “nele”, so maybe the language has drifted a bit since his day. It doesn’t seem so though.

“Ter que” is used a lot in Brazil, and as Elsa says, its increasingly common in colloquial speech in Portugal too. It’s technically wrong but seems to be one of those things that is used a lot. If teenagers and Fernando Pessoa are using it then it’s probably safe to call it a de facto standard. Best avoided in exams, but it seems as if it would be pedantic to pick someone up on it in normal conversation.

So what is “ter que” supposed to be for? It’s quite similar but it is more to do with ownership than obligation. So “tem muito que contar” means “he has a lot to tell”. In other words, he has a lot of experience, he’s an interesting guy. As opposed to “tem de contar muito” which means he’s obliged to tell you a lot.

Tenho muito que fazer = I have a lot on my plate
Tenho de fazer muito = I am being forced to do a lot

I had a complaint about the low quality of the pun in the title, so if you prefer you can think of it as “Ter Que’s Voting For Christmas”

I’m sorry.

Posted in English

Is This The Most Confusing Verb in the Portuguese Language?

Posted on by Colin Lusk
Image of a "Soul Reaver" from some game called Legend of Kain, listed as under a fair use license on Wikipedia. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the article
Frankly, this image is not helping. If anything, it is adding to the confusion.

So I came across this freaky verb today: “Reaver“. No, not rever, reaver. It’s based on the verb “haver” but with the re- prefix. Its h disappears because it would be silent anyway: re+[h]aver=reaver.

Haver is a weird verb to start with because it’s almost always used in the third person singular and it means something like “exists” or “there is”, but it has another meaning, which is “to have” or “to possess” and that’s the sense that’s used with reaver. It means “have again”, “recoup” or “get back”.

Cool, cool, cool, so let’s look for examples of it in use? Most likely form we’ll come across will be re+[h]á=reá, right?

Wrong! Reaver is a defective verb, meaning it doesn’t have a full conjugation. So even though the most-used form of haver is the third person singular present indicative form, that form doesn’t even exist for reaver. The only two forms Priberam’s conjugation allows in the present tense are the nós and vós forms.

Some examples of legitimate use are given in the dictionary entry

  • Ainda não conseguiu reaver o dinheiro que gastou (he still hadn’t been able to get back the money he’d spent)
  • Por duas vezes, eu perdi óculos escuros que nunca reouve (Twice I lost a pair of sunglasses that I never got back)
  • Paradoxalmente, era quando reavia as forças que a certa altura julgava exíguas (paradoxically it was while he was rebuilding his forces that, at some point, he judged them to be too weak)

But if you look at some of the examples Priberam gives of the past-tense use of reaver you come across a citation of a page by Portugal rebelde blog:

  • Cada vez que se reouve uma canção corre-se o risco de reparar em aspetos musicais ou poéticos de que não nos tínhamos apercebido. (Every time one hears a song anew, one runs the risk of noticing a musical or poetical aspects that we hadn’t recognised before)

Well… that’s *not* an example of the past tense of reaver though. That’s the present tense of “reouvir“, meaning to hear again, surely…? And so is this citation from a blog called French Kissin’, also cited by Priberam

  • O disco não tenta sistematizar o tema, muito menos esgotá-lo. Talvez por ser tão despretensioso, ouve-se e reouve-se sem cansar. (The record doesn’t try to systematise the theme, let alone exhaust it. Maybe because it is so unpretentious, one can listen and relisten without getting tired of it)

Googling what I thought would be common forms of the verb, I didn’t really find many examples of it being used in the wild. So… It’s useful to know this exists in case it crops up in books but I don’t think I will be rushing to try and use this one in conversation!

If you’re hungry for more pain and suffering, you can find out more about reaver in this Ciberdúvidas article.

Posted in English

Portugalist

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Portugalist is a sort of lifestyle and travel site with an informal, magazine vibe aimed at english-speaking visitors and residents in Portugal. I’ve tended not to pay much attention to it since I don’t travel much and don’t live there. I’ve just spent some time poking around though, and I must say, there’s some good stuff on there. Their bread-and-butter content is practical and seems very up-to-the-minute: how to get a covid vaccine, navigate finances and bureaucracy and so on. For those of us exiled beyond the sea and just wanting to learn the language, they have a modest-sized language section which doesn’t have much direct learning material but acts as a directory out to other sites and channels where you can find the right course.

Here are a few things I liked, in case you’re not already familiar with it

Posted in English

Double Participles

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Some verbs have two past participles: one that forms part of compound verbs and one that is used primarily as an adjective

InfinitiveStandard ParticipleShorter Participle
AcenderTens acendido a vela?A vela está acesa
AceitarEle tem aceitado as desculpasAs desculpas foram aceitas
ElegerOs americanos têm elegido TrumpO palhaço cor de laranja foi eleito
GanharEu tenho ganhado muito dinheiroO jogo contra Ucrânia já está ganho
PagarMuito obrigado por ter pagado a contaNão te rales, pai, a contas está paga
ExpulsarO governo tinha expulsado o embaixadorNão trabalhei e acabei por ser expulso
Posted in English

Grammarspotting

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I have an evernote page containing interesting and curious sightings of grammar in the wild that I wanted to think about later. I’ll try and make sense of them if I can, but I’m not absiolutely sure what they all mean to be honest, so if you’ve any suggestions I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Cento e tantos degraus de escada é obra, mesmo para quem se apresenta com o cóccix em condições 

I can’t remember where I turned this one up, but it mostly struck me because of the phrase “em condições” which obviously means “in good condition”, so that’s an idiomatic expression to keep in mind. It’s quite a grammatically interesting sentence though really. If I were to try and say that I’d be much more fromal and use more words. I would love to be confident enough to be this relaxed and groovy with my writing. “Cento e tantos” is unusal too. I’ve only ever seen “cento e tal” for “a hundred or so”.

Sabe que eles se podem desligar quando se quer, não sabe?

This sentence by Mario Zambudjal has two instances of “se” which seem to be different. In “se podem desligar” it’s reflexive: they can doisconnect themselves. And in “quando se quer” it’s putting the verb into passive mode, if I’m reading it correctly. “When required”. So putting it all together, “You know they can disconnect at will, don’t you?

Fiz figas para que não me esperassem situações semelhantes às que levaram o Valquerença, sete anos atrás, a riscar-me do quadro do pessoal

I think this is another one from Zambudjal. “Fiz figas” is interesting. It literally means “I made figs” but Gtranslate translates it to “I crossed my fingers”. Fazer figas is more like this in fact, according to the description in Priberam. The meaning is the same as crossing the fingers though: it’s meant to ward off bad luck.

A tua resposta pôs-me a cabeça à roda 

This line from Lúcia Vaz Pedro’s Camões Conseguiu Escrever Muito para Quem Só Tinha um Olho… exemplifies an aspect of grammar that I can never quite get right. I’ve tried to use it a few times but screwed it up every time. It’s got the reflexive pronoun with Pôr but… why? It’s the head that’s spinning so why doesn’t she say “pós a minha cabeça a roda”? Why does it have a reflexive pronoun instead of a posessive pronoun? I asked my wife about this and she just said it’s how it works.

O que lhe passou pela cabeça…

This isn’t reflexive but in other ways, it’s similar to the one above. Why isn’t it just “passou pela cabeça dele/dela?” Why does it need the indirect object “lhe” when it looks like it needs a possessive? The possessive would give you more information. “Passed to him through the head”? Again. my wife just says that how it’s done. It’s a sense of actively passing through the person’s head and it is more grammatically accurate than using the possessive. I might need to sit and meditate on this for an hour or two, I think

Um teste às defesas da sala.

This sentence appears in Z by Manuel Alves. A test to the defences of the room. It’s an example of a preposition that’s used very differently in portuguese than it would be in english.

A perseguição aos Judeus

This one turned up in a history book. I would have expected it to be “dos” instead of “aos” for “The persecution of the Jews

Envolveu-o em operações especulativas tão ruinosas que o atirou para a bancarrota 

This is from Vaticanum by Jose Rodrigues dos Santos. “Para” can be used for “to” in some contexts and “for” in others. In this one, it’s used for someone being thrown to bankruptcy. The guide unhelpfully defines “atirar para” as “lançar para”

Demasiado fatigado para se meter em explicações

Another one from Vaticanum. “meter-se em…” is equivalent to “get involved in”. he was too tired to get drawn into explaining himself to the cops.