Luso

This sentence flummoxed me for two reasons. Firstly because the overall gist didn’t seem to make any sense and secondly the grammar was baffling. I had to ask an expert to explain some it to me.

It’s from Uma Aventura nas Férias da Pascoa, and the lady who’s speaking is exasperated that some kids are making a lot of noise outside her door. The “Francamente!” is there to underscore her disapproval.

Let’s do the grammar first.

So firstly, obviously, we have the usual anglophone confusion of “gente” meaning people but it’s a singular word because of course it is. That’s pretty basic though, so didn’t throw me too badly.

“Pegue” is subjunctive present. Why? Good question. It seems to be a statement about the general qualities of something, nested in a dependent clause, but it doesn’t fit neatly into my subjunctive flowchart, even though it’s recognisably the same kind of sentence structure as sentences that do. I think that’s because “por onde” (“at where”) is doing the job that would normally be done by “que”. [Caveat – I’m pretty sure I’m right about this but didn’t specifically ask so I might be misunderstanding why they’ve used this tense]

And finally, the pronouns, se and lhe right after each other. Lhe means “them” but it is singular because – again – it’s referring to gente, and se is present as an indefinite pronoun*, which is a hard concept to grasp in English. I’ve had a stab at it in this post, but I’m sure it wouldn’t hold up to much scrutiny from an expert.

So if you were to translate it word-for-word in the most literal way possible, the whole sentence is something like “These young people don’t have a place at which one might get hold of them”. Well, that could refer to something that’s so dirty that we’re afraid to touch it for fear of getting our hands dirty, but here it’s referring to people so it must be some sort of expression, right?

The expression “não ter ponta por onde se lhe pegue”,  or “estar sem ponta por onde se pegue” or variations of either, seem to be translated as “to be utter nonsense” on bab.la, and I can see it used in roughly the same way in a few places around the interwebs.

What would be an equivalent expression in English? Since it’s talking about getting a hold of something, I guess something like “I can’t get a handle on it” would be pretty close. It’s not an exact equivalent though, since if you “can’t get a handle on” something in English, you’re leaving open the possibility that you just aren’t clever enough to understand, whereas this is more in the direction of “it can’t be understood, because it doesn’t make any sense”.

More than anything else, what impressed me is that it has been ages since I have come across a sentence that has caused me this much puzzlement, and yet this is a book written for children!

Well done, you’ve made it this far. Reward yourself with this music video.

*I has a query about this so here’s a bit of self-justification! First of all, I wrote “impersonal” in the first draft of this which isn’t quite the right word so I’m sorry I got that wrong. “One” is an indefinite pronoun and in very correct, posh english you use it… ahem… or rather “one uses it” as a neutral pronoun when one wants to use a verb in a very general way, without having anyone specific in mind. I think that’s the closest analogue of what “se” is doing here. Priberam defines it as a “pronome indefinido” (4th and 5th definitions here) and this page gives more detail although confusingly refers to it as a partícula (particle) which I think is incorrect. Or at least in english a pronoun isn’t a particle, but maybe portuguese grammarians have a slightly different taxonomy…?