(Hee hee – no offence to all my lovely Brazilian friends, but when it comes to accents, I know where my allegiances lie!)
I actually saw this a couple of days ago and considered posting it here but realised at the last minute that the account that had posted it was some CHEGA chud, so I’m glad to see it pop up again on a pure humour account so I can share it without promoting idiots.
Intrigued by this comment on Reddit
Em dias de jogo no dragão o pessoal estaciona na entrada e saída da VCI. O defeito é que a polícia não multa.
Jogo no dragão? VCI?
It turned out to be pretty boring. They aren’t recreating the Dragon Challenge from the Tri-Wizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, O Estádio do Dragão is just the name of the ground where Futebol Clube do Porto is based. And a VCI? A Via de Cintura Interna – The inner ring road.
Not the most exciting bit of research ever, but always nice to know these little things.
😞
If you read the post this morning, I think there were a couple of errors so I’ve added a lot of notes (in English because I’m exhausted) at the bottom, so if you’re hungry for more, go back and have a look!
I made a video today. It’s going to take some editing. I was out at the allotment and nobody was about but I expect the people who go into the bushes nearby for a crafty wee were confused to hear a ghostly voice talking in Portuguese followed by “oh for fuck’s sake” and then repeating the same thing, over and over again as I stumbled over words.
I kept saying “nesta estação…” but it kept coming in out as netestastão. I’d never thought of it as a trava-Língua but… Ugh.
Meanwhile, this lad took advantage of my distraction to ransack the greenhouse for stray seeds.
Quick vocabulary test: how do you say Robin in Portuguese? No, I couldn’t remember either. I had to look it up. Pisco-de-peito-ruivo.
In case anyone has been on the fence about signing up for Practice Portuguese, the lads are having a sale so you can get it for a reduced price by clicking their link.
My phone’s latest update has a built-in AI art generator so I don’t have to faff about online making pics using a third party website. My phone settings are all in Portuguese though, so I have to give it instructions in Portuguese too. Good practice for speaking clearly!
The only limitation I’ve found so far is it refuses to draw people. That’s OK, I only like ducks at the moment.
I asked a question in reddit about the word “deliver”, specifically in the context of birth, and although the answer was pretty simple, it opened up a rabbit-hole that went pretty deep!
In English we use deliver to mean two different things, but you wouldn’t use the standard verb to deliver (“entregar”) for either of them. Firstly, deliver is what the mother does. Well that’s easy. We have a choice of verbs – parir, or the beautiful “dar à luz”. And secondly, we also use deliver to describe what the medical professional does, whether it be the doctor (médico of course) or the midwife (parteira). And this is the bit I realised I was stuck on: how do you say “the doctor delivered a baby.
A few people misunderstood the question and said it should be parir. O médico pariu? Um… No.
But the root of the problem of course is that there just isn’t a verb for it. It’s just a weirdness of English that we use the same verb for both. Instead, you’d have to use “assistir ao parto” or “realizar o parto”, relegating the doctor to more of an ancillary role, rather than letting him or her take all the glory from the mother by claiming to have “delivered” the baby. Well, that seems like a good thing to me.
And of course, just to complete the picture, Portuguese give a more active role to the baby. Babies don’t passively get born (ser nascido???) the verb is “nascer”, actively, as if it was something they did by themselves.
But there’s more! And I’ll tell you about it after this gif.
Firstly, “assistir ao parto” seems to be a relatively rare use of the verb “assistir” in a way that’s more familiar to English-speakers, since the doctor is assisting/helping, rather than just spectating, which is usually what assistir means in Portuguese (see here if you don’t know what I’m on about)
Secondly, the word “prenha” came up, meaning pregnant. I’d seen the verb “emprenhar” (impregnate) recently and wondered how prenha/emprenhar differed from grávida/engravidar. Prenha and emprenhar tend to be used more with animals. So if you’re a stock breeder, emprenhar is the verb for a cow becoming prenha, but I think your wife would not thank you for using those same words to announce that she is expecting.
While researching prenha in Priberam, I spotted a couple more interesting differences.
Firstly, let’s talk about the gender of the adjectives. Grávida exists in a masculine form, grávido, which is actually the default form of the adjective, however stupid that might be. Prenha, on the other hand doesn’t have a masculine form, prenho, but there is a synonym, prenhe, which ends in e and, as such, it wouldn’t change even if, by some miracle, a bull could get knocked up.
Secondly, there’s a difference in how the verbs are used: Emprenhar is defined as “Tornar ou ficar prenhe” (here) In other words, it means “get pregnant”, and applies only to what happens to the female. Engravidar, on the other hand, can mean both “tornar-se grávida” (get pregnant) or “Fazer ficar grávida” (impregnate) so it can be applied to the dad role just as easily as the mum role (here) .
That’s an awful lot of useful stuff from just one little question, don’t you think?
… If I’d been asked to guess where I lost the most marks, Compreensão do Oral would not have been my first choice!
My last exam result came out in early January last year, so I have been constantly checking and re-checking the page to see if the DUPLE results are out. I leave it open in my browser and then refresh it next time I have a spare minute.
No luck yet.
Culatra means the part of the gun where you’d usually load the ammunition. So if it’s saindo pela culatra it’s… Backfiring! Their idea has backfired. I like that.
Luso 