I think this might be my favourite example of weird english slang being absorbed into portuguese. So far I have only come across brazilian examples, but like the US and UK, these things have a way of making their way across the atlantic. For those of you who don’t have kids of a certain age, “shipping” is when you speculate/imagine/fantasise about two people, real or imaginary, who are, or should be in a relationSHIP. From what I can tell, tween girls seem to do it a lot with males: fictional characters, pop stars, or whoever. I’m not sure why their being gay should be so exciting, but who can understand anything when it comes to tweenagers? Often there’s a ship name like Rydon (Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross) or Klance (Keith and Lance from the series Voltron). It’s always kinda been around in celebrity gossip (Brangelina, for example) but seems to be a huge deal in fandoms, with people arguing over matches between diverse and unlikely characters.
I just love that it’s become a proper portuguese verb, although I’m a little sad to see it’s not on conjuga-me.net yet. Most new additions to the language from english end up being AR verbs because they’re more regular than ER or IR.
The video below contains (a) brazilian accent and (b) coraçõezinhos
So I’m trying to sort out some basic grammar that I probably should have worked out a long time ago. To do this, I’ve been working with a different teacher who lives in the UK, simply because I don’t have the skills to be able to even ask the question in Portuguese and I needed someone who would understand me asking in english
Today: What’s the difference between these ways of exressing possession.
A sua propriedade
Propriedade sua
A propriedade dele
It always seems a bit random and I’ve never quite been able to spot a pattern. The third one is the obvious odd one out because it’s the only one that makes it clear that it’s the property of “him”, whereas the others could all be him, her, them, or, if you’re being formal, the person you’re speaking to, so in a way that helps – you could use when you wanted to be very specific about who it belongs to. In practice, I’m told, it’s also used in less formal, spoken situations.
As for the first and second, the answer seems to be simpler than I thought though: it just depends whether you have a definite article in there. If it’s a specific thing: this is his property, it’s “a sua propriedade”, whereas the second quote, which comes from my review of the film Comboio de Sal e Açúcar is about the subject’s attitude: he treated the passengers as his property.
O livro é de um amigo meu [indefinite article: it belongs to a friend of mine]
O livro é do meu amigo [definite article: it belongs to my friend]
Now, here’s the shock though: I had been thinking of these words – seu, meu, minha, etc as possessive pronouns, but they’re not, they’re determinantes – more like adjectives, really: In “o meu amigo”, “amigo” is the noun and “meu” just determines whose friend he is. Meu can also be a possessive pronoun but only when it stands in for the noun.
“O Donald, as suas mãos são pequenas; as minhas são grandes”. In this sentence, “suas” is another determinant but “minhas” is a possessive pronoun because I’m using it instead of saying the whole noun again “as minhas maãos”. In english it’s doing the job of “mine” instead of just “my”. There are some other examples, explained in portuguese on Ciberdúvidas.
OK, simple, I can understand a couple of simple rules like that. I guess, though, it’s like most rules in english: you obey them only insofar as you can do so without writing something ugly. So I cam across a counter-example within about ten minutes of this conversation happening in the song “Saia Rodada” by Carminho. I’ve pasted the lyrics below and highlighted forms that match in green and the one that doesn’t in red.
Vesti a saia rodada
P’r’ apimentar a chegada
Do meu amor
No mural postei as bodas
Rezei nas capelas todas
Pelo meu amor
Vem lá de longe da cidade e tem
Os olhos rasos de saudade em mim
E eu mando-lhe beijos e recados em retratos meus
Pensa em casar no fim do verão que vem
Antes pudesse o verão não mais ter fim
Que eu estou tão nervosa com esta coisa do casar
Meu Deus
Vesti a saia rodada
P’r’ apimentar a chegada
Do meu amor
No mural postei as bodas
Rezei nas capelas todas
Pelo meu amor
Por tantas vezes pensei eu também
Sair daqui atrás dos braços seus
De cabeça ao vento e a duvidar o que faz ele por lá
I think all that’s happening here is that she’s stretched the normal rules to make the rhyme with “adeus” work in the next triplet. I’ve added it to my list of questions for next time.
Anyway, as a side note, I wondered what a “saia rodada” was anyway. A round skirt? I googled it and saw a load of pictures of… well… skirts. So I asked online and was told it would all make sense if I searched for videos of “saia rodada danca” but it didn’t work because there’s an insupportable brasilian rock band called saia rodada and this is the first video I got.
But then a portuguese guy mentioned that it was “folclorico” so I added that into my search and had more luck. Apparently it’s a long, swishy skirt that is used in a lot of dances because of the way it moves. Here are some people demonstrating. Tag yourself, I’m the guy in the grey trousers.
WHew! It’s been a long time since I wrote this much about grammar and general musings. Well, come for the determinantes possessivos, stay for the grupo folclórico.
It’s been a while since I posted any of those “Key Learnings” from lessons and I should probably do it more to give my crap memory a bit of a nudge to do its job. So here are couple of things I picked up from today’s Aula. They’re both really close near-cognates with subtly different meanings:
Consensual
This word looks like a straight-up cognate but it’s diverged slightly from the english meaning and stayed closer to “consensus” than “consent”.
É consensual no meio cientifica nao haver o direito de modificar o patrimonio hereditário da espécie humana.
…means something like “It’s agreed by everyone in the field of science that we don’t have the right to modify the human genetic heritage”
Presentear
This word obviously comes from the same root as the verb “to present” but it isn’t used in the positive sense – presenting people with gifts or medals, for example, only ironically in negative situations.
O objectivo é conseguir substâncias capazes de corrigir os efeitos com que a natureza vai presenteado os homens
…means something like “The objective is to find substances that can correct the symptoms with which nature has presented people”
I came across this abbreviation in Português Empresarial. Nobody seemed to know what it meant but a Brazilian named Cynthia solved the mystery. It stands for ” volume de negócios” -ie, a company’s turnover. I don’t know why the second V is there. Maybe the person who invented it had a stutter (“gagueira” if you want to know – or “gaguejar” in the verb form)
I tend to update every so often about the state of Portuguese language podcasts. Currently, Practice Portuguese seems to have entered another lull. Their podcasts are very infrequent and I have cancelled my subs because I don’t use the website much and it felt like I had given them enough money, but I might start it again if they seem to be doing more things I can use.
Meanwhile, my current favourite, Portuguese with Carla has followed their example by using a subscription model. They’re going to start releasing shorter podcasts for the general public and the full thing only for Carla’s own personal students. Since her time is limited and she charges pretty high-end rates, I can’t imagine there will be many of those, so it’ll be a pretty limited listenership, I should think. The first series, with 50 episodes, is still available though and still well worth a listen, especially for newbies, since it is very slow and very gentle but doesn’t lack depth! I think they are expanding in other areas too, and they even have a range of t-shirts with portuguese phrases on them*.
Say it in Portuguese is still knocking out the occasinal episode but is fairly dormant and Portuguese Lab Podcast seems to be chugging along, although I must admit I haven’t really got to grips with it yet.
*Speaking of t-shirts, I am definitely having something off Cão Azul next birthday…
I’ve just put together a Memrise deck with vocabulary from Portugues Empresarial in case anyone’s interested in vocabulary related to business. I think I’d like to do more of these theme decks in future – maybe one for computing hardware and software, for example. It’s a bit more useful, I think, than the long lists of nouns and verbs I’ve done in the past.
It’s been a while since I posted any of those “Key Learnings” from lessons and I should probably do it more to give my crap memory a bit of a nudge to do its job. So here are couple of things I picked up from today’s Aula. They’re both really close near-cognates with subtly different meanings:
Luso 