Category: English

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?