Question from iTalki:
Como se chama este tipo de penteado? Em inglês, chama-se “man bun” (pãozinho de homem), mas em português…?
According to Zico, it’s called “um coque” but that’s in Brazil, and in Portugal that means exactly what you think it would mean. In Portugal it would be “um carrapito” or “um pompom”. Oh and in case you’re wondering, a straightforward ponytail is called “um rabo de cavalo” which is a nice, literal translation = > easy!
Fiz a encomenda para este livro há três meses mas não cheguei até ontem. É lindo, não é?
I was interested to see the reaction to “Don’t Blame Benny” a few days ago, both from the author of Loving Language, Richard Benton, and from the subject of the original post, Benny Lewis, via twitter. The debate of which it is a tiny part is still going on and I think it’s well worth a look if you are in the mood for a new perspective on languages. The latest post is here, but you can track back to earlier instalments.
I’m not planning to say anything more on the subject because I feel like I’ve had my say already. I find myself drawn to his core idea of learning languages spoken widely in your own community (see the second video on the about page for a good intro) despite already-expressed reservations about some of the specific arguments advanced in support of it.
Anyway, in case you’re interested, here’s a map that did the rounds a year or two back of the languages most spoken in my home town of London, other than English of course. I live in LB Richmond where the second language is Polish. To be honest, I wouldn’t have guessed this as it’s so diverse around here that there isn’t one dominant group. Just thinking of children in my daughter’s class at primary school and their parents (maybe 40 kids in total over the years): Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, America, Canada, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Iceland, um…. Oh Lordy, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few… she shared a class with three times as many children with Portuguese language ties as Polish, for what it’s worth.
There’s a breakdown of the numbers on randomlylondon, which I basically agree with: that it’s surprising to see Portuguese Spanish and French as dominant languages in some boroughs, and interesting that if Southwark were a bit bigger, it and Lambeth would look like a tiny map of the Iberian Peninsula. Portuguese around Streatham, Clapham, Vauxhall sounds about right though, so if you want to know where to get a decent cup of coffee or a custard tart, now you know.
What surprised me most is that Greenwich seems to be Little Kathmandu! If you’d asked me to guess I would have said that you’d need to move the entire population of Nepal to London to make an appreciable dent in the demographics, but… well, that’s what the numbers say, apparently. 26 million people live in Nepal, 50,000 in the UK and 19,000 in London. I should have been more surprised by the fact that Lithuania (population less than 3 million) seems to have so many of its citizens based out in the Essex fringes.
One of the odd things about listening to portuguese comedy is not quite being sure what the cultural reference points are. The first time I experienced this was when I was listening to something from Rádio Commercial. Mixórdia de Temáticas? It might have been that. There was a character on it who was talking in a weird high-pitched voice and lisping. My first thought was that he was Spanish because the Spanish lisp their Z and soft C sounds, but that didn’t seem right, and then it hit me he was a comedy gay man. There are… let’s see… *counts on fingers* three types of comedy gay man. The rarest is the scary type – like Uncle Monty from Withnail and I. They’re creeping into your room at night and saying stuff like “I mean to have you even if it must be burglary”, but that wasn’t it.
The second type, and the most common these days, is the sharp-tongued gay man from TV shows who is well-dressed, a great dancer, and with a bottomless well of catty put-downs. He’s usually best friends with the leading woman, maybe sharing her flat, and he is very scornful of her latest boyfriend. Well, needless to say, this type didn’t fit the bill either.
What it reminded me of most Mr Humphries from “Are You Being Served”. Do you know this show? It was inexplicably popular when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties. Well, I say inexplicably, but there was very little else on TV so we didn’t have much choice. Anyway, if you’re my age and British you’ll almost certainly know it, but I think it was sold overseas too, so maybe you yanks will have seen it too. At that time, TV was full of them: Larry Grayson’s screen persona, Gunner Beaumont from “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”, and various bit parts in everything from The Dick Emery Show to Carry On. You don’t see many Mr Humphrieses on UK TV these days, for much the same reason as you wouldn’t see a bloke with boot polish on his face calling himself Rangi Ram and saying “youuu blaaaaaddy fooool”: the world has grown up. So hearing this apparent echo from the past speaking Portuguese on Rádio Comercial threw me off balance a bit. Is Portuguese Radio just a bit behind the times? Is there something more intelligent and interesting going on that I’m just not fluent enough to follow? Or was he Spanish after all? Ach, ask me again next year. I might have sussed it out by then.
I saw an interesting and controversial article on Twitter, published on the Loving Language Blog (a blog I follow but apparently missed this the first time around!). The author, Richard Benton, seems really cool and I like his approach to learning languages and building communities in general but in this case I think he has picked the wrong target and maybe also been a little pessimistic and since twitter is a bit limited in space allowed for a reply I thought I’d do a blog post to say why I think so.
Firstly, let’s start with the man mentioned in the first paragraph – Benny Lewis, aka Benny the Irish Polyglot, author of “Fluent in 3 Months“. Benny is the best known example of what I would call a “celebrity polyglot”. In other words, he is mainly famous for learning languages, quickly and publicly, watched by a huge audience on all social media channels. He has written books and in the process inspired a lot of people to change how they learn languages. Cards on the table, I am one of those people. I used to learn languages mainly from books. It didn’t work out too well I’m afraid, but I’m having a lot more success these days. largely thanks to him. I’m not a full-blown disciple, and I don’t follow him very closely, mainly because one of the languages he speaks is a hideous travesty called Brazilian Portuguese, but I have to admit if I hadn’t stumbled across his website I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have got as far as I have.
Lewis himself is part of the digital nomad movement but I wouldn’t say he was the author of it. That honour seems to go primarily to Tim Ferriss, author of “The Four Hour Work Week“, a guide for people who want to live carefree in the world by farming out their work to a third world underling. To be honest, I haven’t read any of his 6,729 published works so I am probably being unfair, but this seems to be the buzz around it. Ferriss himself started a hands-off business selling supplements through a website which apparently was nice little earner, but I bet his income as an author and speaker has eclipsed that a long time ago. So when I read about a gathering of digital nomads who were all “white people” (I’ll come back to that later) it was Ferriss I was thinking of, not Lewis.
I share the view that encouraging people to produce as little actual value as possible and just ponce off the labour of others seems like a recipe for the worst kind of douchebaggery but I must admit that some of the followers of the four hour workweek have spawned some interesting and useful business ideas that have actually made the world better without any real harm. Benny is a pretty good example of that, and I can also think of Steve Kamb, creator of Nerd Fitness, who turns couch potatoes into ACTUAL SUPER HEROES! And I’m sure they’re not the only ones.
Shelving the wider question of digital nomads, let’s focus specifically on the polyglot angle to this. The case against Benny seems to be largely that he “gave people the tools to exploit more people in more countries”. I don’t think this is entirely fair. Rich people have always been able to exploit poor people – that’s usually how they got rich. Now maybe more knowledge is more power, but I don’t think learning language from someone makes your hosts poorer or makes you a worse human. Moreover, I don’t actually see why people shouldn’t travel while they work.
This brings me back to the “Notice how many white people are there?” comment. I find this irritating, to be honest. If someone posted a picture of a café in London and said “Look how many Asians are there?” I would find it annoying for exactly the same reasons. Being foreign doesn’t make you bad. Let’s stick to what people are doing while they’re there. Maybe there’s a case to answer for the behaviour of the white people (and Richard certainly seems to think so, as we’ll see below) but I think starting with the skin colour is unhelpful.
The observation does have some light to shed though, in one important way: what it tells us is that here we have a lot of people from Oz, from the UK, from America, who have – so we’re told – read “Fluent in 3 Months” and spent enough time listening to locals that they can now hold a conversation. Well hallelujah! Back when I was slumming it around the world, my method of communication consisted of “Excuse me, do you speak English?” I’m not proud of that but it’s true. And all my fellow travellers – Kiwis, Yanks, Aussies, Brits – were just as bad because historically English speakers have been absolutely terrible at learning languages. Wherever we go we’ll find someone who is able to speak English well enough to direct us to the nearest photo opportunity, so why bother, right? The fact that that’s changing seems like a huge step forward. Not the whole answer but a start.
From a survey of various Polyglot sites and podcasts, I can see there are a few things about the whole “polyglot” thing that rub me up the wrong way. Some of those things are related to “digital nomad” culture, but when I think them through, more often than not, they are usually just aspects of the wider cult of hedonism and self-actualisation in western society, and particularly younger people of the American persuasion (I’m 47 and British so maybe I’m biased!)
However, I can’t lay any of these problems at the door of language-hacking; they’re all things that were happening anyway, but in the past they were done by people speaking (or shouting) only English and unable to understand any objections put to them. Encouraging English speakers to pay attention to people from other cultures is a huge benefit, because contrary to what the blog post implies, language-hacking doesn’t consist of drinking by the pool; you have to speak to other humans, and little by little, those language students will absorb enough actual experience from their interlocutors that in time they will come to have a broader appreciation of other cultures. And oh my god, is that ever something our world needs right now! This, to me, seems like the truly good and important thing about the trend for learning languages. It’s small but it’s significant, and I think we should encourage it.
And for those of us who don’t travel, the internet is such a huge help. I’m learning Portuguese and my daughter is learning Japanese from a native speaker on the other side of the globe. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it would have been for me, age eleven, in Preston at the dawn of the eighties to learn Japanese. That’s a whole window open in her mind that was never opened in mine. And it’s happening more and more in the Anglosphere. Thank you internet. Thank you! And thank you Benny Lewis! For all your imperfections, you beautiful Irish moustache owner. Thank you! Thank you!
*=Sorry, this isn’t an expression I use often but it seems to fit in this context!
Disclaimer
It’s too easy, when discussing things like colonialism and race, to stray the wrong side of the line that divides debate from incivility. I hope I have stayed on the right side of that line. I am not in any way intending to disrespect the blog post or – God forbid – make any sort of daft reverse-racism aspersion about the comments about the white people in the photograph. I’ll leave such tactics to the knuckle-draggers, Alt-Right and Trump supporters, but if I haven’t expressed any of it properly then I hope you’ll not hold my poor prose style against me!
Na segunda-feira, a minha esposa e eu fomos ao Barbican Centre, uma sala de concertos em Londres para ver um concerto da famosa cantora Ana Moura. O nosso sobrinho, que tem vinte e dois anos, cuidou da nossa filha. Ambos fomos directos do trabalho e mesmo assim quase chegámos atrasados. Sem surpresa, quando chegamos, ouvimos muitas vozes portuguesas no átrio, porque a Ana Moura é muito mais conhecida em Portugal do que em Inglaterra e vivem entre quarenta mil e cinquenta mil portugueses em Londres, a trabalhar principalmente na indústria de serviços.
O concerto começou com “Moura Encantada”, que é uma canção que conheço bem. Depois, cantou alguns fados tradicionais, cheios de saudade e pena, mas também cantou vários fados mais novos como “fado dançado” e até uma canção em inglês – 
Lilac Wine de Nina Simone. Ela disse que “Lilac Wine” é uma canção que representa o espírito do fado apesar de não ser portuguesa. Depois de três canções um homem na audiência gritou “Ah Fadista”. Aparentemente isto é um grande elogio para uma cantora. Finalmente, ela cantou as duas canções mais conhecidas, que se chamam “Dia de Folga” e “Desfado”.
Gostámos muito do concerto. Eu aproveitei para ouvir as palavras das canções, e além da Ana, ambos adorámos o som da guitarra portuguesa, tocada por Ângelo Freire.
So here’s a good example of half-understanding a song and completely missing the point. I always thought this song was about a Moorish (Moroccan, Saracen, Muslim) sorcerer of some kind, but swotting up on my Ana Moura lyrics ahead of next week’s concert, I found out that it’s not that at all. Apparently a Moura is a fairy-tale creature from old Galician and portuguese legends. Reading the description on the Wikipedia page, it sounds an awful lot like a djinn/genie of Arabic folktales, so it’s not wholly fanciful that the moor in the sense of Moorish invaders (Mouros) and the Mouro/Moura of legend are bound up in some way, but it certainly illustrates the point that relying on half-understanding most of the words in a song can be deceptive!
I’m just putting a list together of Portuguese music that I can listen to on Spotify and I have been looking at lyrics/translations of songs. There are still loads of tracks on my iPod that I can’t quite follow so I have to figure out what the words are. It’s a pretty good way of learning vocabulary. As usual, I am often quite surprised at the humour hiding in what sounds like a fairly straight-faced song. Like this one for example: I had no idea what they were saying, but once I saw the words on the screen this whole world of content poured out of it and now I can enjoy it on a whole other level.
The list is here, by the way. It has a couple of non-European accents – Os Mutantes (Brasil) and Cesaria Évora (Cabo Verde) but apart from that it’s sound.
I think I’m something of a freak for not liking DAMA since everyone asks me if I do. They must be like the Portuguese Coldplay or something – one of those bands that seem to be inexplicably popular despite their overpowering blandness. I only like one song and that has a Brazilian rapper on it so I can’t listen to that either.
I mentioned a little while ago that I was intrigued by a Luisa Sobral song called “Língua Dos Pês”, which means “The Language of Ps” or if you prefer “P Language”. As it turns out, this is a song with a back-story. It’s a made-up language, similar to the Pig Latin or Egg-language (aka Eggy-Peggy or Egglish) that you might be familiar with if you went to the right school. It isn’t a proper language or even a secret code, more of a language game you can play just for the fun of it.
Like everything else in Portuguese, it has a European and a Brazilian variant. As you know, this blog is fully on-side with Europe, so we’ll stick to that. Basically, all you need to do is repeat each syllable of each word, but with a P at the start, either before the vowel or in place of the consonant. So for example the name of Luisa’s album is also her first name, Luisa, which, in Língua dos Pês is Lu–Pu–I–Pi–Sa–Pa.
It sounds quite nice in Portuguese:
da-pa ten-pen-ta-pa-ção-pão son-pon-o-po-ra-pa de-pe u-pu-ma-pa me-pe-tá-pá-for-por-a-pa*
which is why she is able to sing a song in it, but it’s awkward in English:
He-pe-llo-po My-py name-pame is-pis Col-pol-in-pin
and similarly, eggy-peggy sounds like a disaster in Portuguese
Peggor eggexeggempleggo eggestegga freggasegge
And it gets worse if you use the actual Portuguese word for egg:
Povoor ovoexovoemplovoo ovoestovoa frovoasovoe
Geggood legguck preggoneggouncegging theggat!
It’s interesting that certain types of language game suit specific languages better than others, although I admit I don’t know quite what it means.
OK, are you ready to look at that video again? Well, the one I posted last time, from the children’s TV show “Panda and Friends” was pretty toe-curling, but there’s a much better version here in an an interview with O Observador. She talks a bit about the track and the album in general, then starts singing Língua Dos Pês at about 5:42 and carries on with “Onde Foi o Avô?” (“Where did Grandpa go?”) and her single “João”.
If you need any help, there’s a translation of the song here but only into straightforward Portuguese. You’ll have to do the rest yourself!
Wikipedia Page about Língua dos Pês, with various dialects (includes links to other similar dialects in other languages)
The Brazilian equivalent if you’re interested is called Língua do P.
*=this is a line from a poem by José Jorge Letria. I heard it on a podcast and didn’t understand the whole thing but picked out “A poem born of an impulse, of a fever… of the sonorous temptation of a metaphor” early on. Ooh yeah, more of that please!
Here in the UK, everyone’s nerves are shredded. It’s the 22nd of June, the day before the referendum. At this stage, nobody is going to change their mind and on Twitter, conversation quickly moves from disputing the veracity of a statistic to name-calling, blocking and general unpleasantness.
That being the case, I thought I would go further afield and look at some Portuguese reporting on the Brexit on the grounds that looking in from the outside might give some useful perspective. A few days ago, I blogged about the delightful description of Boris Johnson by Miguel Esteves Cardoso in a column in Público (cf “Learning from the Brexiteers“) but I have come across some other examples, too. As you would expect, it’s a mixture of fear for the future of the EU and the Western Alliance more broadly, versus a sort of mystified bafflement about why we are having this collective hissy-fit, and I’ve even seen a few saying “sod ’em” and describing the UK as “the Crying Child of Europe”. It’s a fair cop.
First of all, I was interested to see some views from Portuguese people living in Britain. Here’s one in the Jornal de Notícias, and another in Bom Dia Europa. The worry for existing residents is twofold. First of all, although it’s unlikely there would be mass deportations, nobody knows what post-brexit Britain will be like, so it’s not impossible, and with the mood getting as ugly as it is. I know my wife and some of her friends are already sensing a higher level of ambient resentment against them from people whose opinions are formed by the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Secondly, Portuguese people will have a higher level of hassle and inconvenience moving about,. Presumably it’ll be the same for Brits living in Spain who will be lose a lot of their current rights and entitlements. And we haven’t even got into things like VAT harmonisation and the nightmare small businesses will face dealing with paperwork, reclaiming money and on and on. Some of the interviewees are small business owners and there’s a level of concern about the unknown consequences as they see the remain campaign being forced onto the back foot by the giddy, unthinking optimism of the leave campaign for some ill-defined future. Some are considering leaving.
Next, let’s look at a blogger – César Agosto – who writes for Homo Causticus on WordPress. He has blogged a few times on the referendum and related matters such as the last general and mayoral elections. I don’t know anything about him but I guess he must live here, or visit often, or at least be a keen bifewatcher because his blogs draw on a knowledge of history and pop culture. In “As Propostas Por Favor” he rightly highlights the lack of a clear sense of what is to come after Brexit, and the problem that causes in trying to decide whether or not you want to support it. In Life on Mars he uses the TV show of the same name as a jumping-off point to illustrate differences between the seventies, when the first EEC referendum took place and the modern world, where we are now holding the second one on the European Union. The first is typified by the famous debate between Tony Benn (much-revered eccentric hero of the left) and Roy Jenkins (mainly remembered, I think, for his speech impediment). Each one is measured and forceful, defending their views (basically: economics vs democracy) without rancour (just as well… I don’t like to think what would happen if Roy Jenkins were to say “Rancour”).
What he could add, but kindly doesn’t, is that the second is typified by the sight of useless, workshy UKIP MEP Nigel Farage telling Herman Van Rompuy ” I don’t want to be rude but, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk”. And this is what our country has come to after forty years. Other modern figures get a mention too, and not just the usual suspects. Redwood gets a mention, and Cameron’s Eton demeanour is contrasted with Sadiq Khan, famously the son of a bus driver. Bizarrely, he is described as charismatic, although to me he seems to disappear into the background on any stage he’s on, even when he’s actually speaking, but hi ho.
In the news media, there is some sympathy for the idea that the EU is in need of a good kick in the arse. For example, José Pedro Teixeira Fernandes says “Long Live the European Union – and Down with the technocracy of Brussels and Frankfurt” while José Vítor Malheiros proclaims “The EU has turned Europe into a brothel” and argues that the brexit might just cause a welcome return of democracy to the region. Portugal, of course, has had its fair share of problems with the EU, and has more cause for complaint than our whining. With that in mind, Paulo Pisco calls the brexit vote “A national egoism” and defends the humanist spirit of the European project against the xenophobia and selfishness of one nation that seems to want to dominate it completely. Actually, Público is buzzing with columnists looking for an angle on the story, so you can take your pick, really.
Finally, there’s an article I can’t even read in its entirety because it has a paywall but I liked the first few lines. As you know, last week some deranged idiot, driven on by some misplaced sense of fighting against “traitors” shot and killed his local Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, near a constituency surgery. There was – and still is – a heated and rather nonconstructive debate about the extent to which the tone of the Leave Campaign’s rhetoric fed a climate of violence that led to the attack. In “I am Jo“, João Duque invokes the memory of “I am Charlie” to stand with her against violence and for European values. Paraphrasing the first three sentences:
If Jo Cox died because she believed the UK is important to the EU then I am Jo
If she believed that a more diverse Europe can be richer and more stable then I am Jo
If Jo Cox believed that democracy will allow wisdom to prevail then I am Jo
Luso 