Here are a couple of things that have come up recently that I thought were worth pointing out. basically, it boils down to this: singers are lying to us. Wake up, sheeple! The global songwriting elite, at the behest of the pentaverate, are deliberately spreading misinformation because they only care about their rhyme schemes and something called “poetry”, whatever that is.
We’re sometimes told that learning song lyrics can help us to learn portuguese. Well, up to a point. We learn quite a lot from it, but there is something you need to remember – and it’s what we call poetic license. Basically, singers need to make their lines scan, and they need to make everything rhyme, and as a result, what you get sounds good but isn’t always the most natural speech. This is true in english too of course: it’s near Christmas now, and no doubt many foreigners are listening to Christmas songs. Do we really say “The bells are ringin’ OUT for Chrismas Day”? Not really. And have you ever heard anyone who wasn’t singing say “Have YOURSELF a merry LITTLE christmas”? Obviously we have to be aware that there’ll be stuff like this in portuguese lyrics too.
I’ve had a couple of instances lately where I’ve phrased something a certain way in a text and been told it was wrong and I’ve thought, wait, I’m sure I’ve heard that structure in a song. One was “Que desmancha prazeres que eu sou” (“what a spoilsport I am!”). When challenged on this I appealed to Chief Judge Ana Bacalhau who sings this lyric in one of Deolinda’s songs:
Sou da geração sem remuneração.
Deolinda – “Parva Que Sou“
E não me incomoda esta condição.
Que parva que eu sou.
It’s not ungrammatical of course, but it has more syllables than it needs to have. It doesn’t need two “ques” and it doesn’t need the pronoun either.
In another context, I told someone: “nao há obrigação alguma”. I would normally use “nenhum(a)” but I’d heard it with “algum(a)” in the following line by notable sadness-enjoyer, Ana Moura, and I decided to try it out for myself:
Cantá-lo bem sem sequer o ter sentido
Ana Moura – “Desfado“
Senti-lo como ninguém, mas não ter sentido algum
But apparently that line should really “não ter sentido nenhum” but it obviously didn’t sound as good in the wider song so they seem to have just switched it. Terrible! If we can’t trust fadistas to teach us the true path, who can we trust?
Next time I see that Ana Moura, she owes me a beer.
Luso 