How a Portuguese-To-English Phrasebook Became a Cult Comedy Sensation
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
You must understand that we have such a small country and few foreigners bother to learn our language, even when they come to visit us. As we are a very nice bunch of people (we are, even our political revolution was made with carnation flowers [quite similar to roses], not a single bullet was shot), and we are very proud of having the oldest stable borders of all Europe (since 1180 or something like that), we are proud to be able to provide our visitors with the best possible experience. Therefore, if you don't learn our language, we must try to communicate with you in other ways! You see, we don't want foreigners to make fools out of themselves. I'll give you an example: we cook almost every part of the pork, even the pork's balls, so we don't want you to eat "tubaros" (pork's "balls") without you knowing it. we also cook the intestines (bucho), so we want you to be prepared for the experience (put some lemon).
On a more serious note (although I'm speaking some truth above), if you only know a very small subset of the english vocabulary, you have to be creative. So you have to speak in English as you would do in Portuguese. Unfortunately it doesn't help that the english language sometimes mixes the verb and the predicate(?) (from our perspective, of course). An example:
- João - John
- é - is
- tipo - guy
- porreiro - nice
So "O João é um tipo porreiro" translates directly to "The John is a guy nice". Then, when you translate "to the letter" local proverbs such as "Quem tem língua vai a Roma", you start getting stupid things like "With a tongue one go to Rome" which in fact means something like "He who as a tongue can go to Rome" (meaning that anyone who can speak [has a tongue] can ask for directions).
All in all, in the end we just don't want our visitors to eat something they'll regret later!
I love this. I'd like to update it for the modern age. "He who has a phone can look up Rome."
Though, it kind of removes the social element and replaces it with technical skill. Not exactly a one for one correlation.
It could be argued that the degree to which we talk online via forums, social media, email, etc means we actually chat more, not less. I wouldn't begin to know how to come up with meaningful stats. For many people, "screwing with their phone" very often involves chatting online.
But we also have incredible location related resources these days that didn't exist until relatively recently. Thanks to the development of GIS and GPS, we can go online and get exact coordinates.
But, also, traveling that far can involve booking flights, train tickets, etc. That is an entirely different skill set. You can be terrible at conversing with people but good at using online mapping resources and ticketing resources.
Technology has multipled the ways we can skin this cat. But, having traveled via local and commuter buses from San Diego county to the High Desert and done part of the research online and part by talking with bus drivers while en route, I don't think being good at asking directions is an obsolete skill. It is a skill that you perhaps can get by without if you do not have it. But I could probably still get to Rome if I needed to by talking with people along the way, whether I had a phone or not. It's something I am decently talented at, on a good day.
Being Brazilian, Continental Portuguese sounds awful to me. But then I've heard many Portuguese people saying that Brazilian Portuguese sounds awful to them :)
What was left of Portugal (European-side) was now a small land with difficulty to defend its independence from the neighbor Spain that would now be hostile to communist regimes, besides historically aiming to get the whole of Iberia under a single government.
The new government installed in continental Portugal was initially populated by the URSS cronies (Alvaro Cunhal & co.) who quickly realized that military power wouldn't be readily available to protect their sovereignty and grip in power. However, their own party (PCP) was familiar with resistance (they had survived for decades in such manner) and at that time, Portuguese was closer to the Brazilian Portuguese and easy for Spanish people to understand, which they saw as a flaw.
So they made arrangements for Russian teachers to modify the language taught in schools, alongside with government intervention in media (newspapers, radio, tv, events) to gradually modify spoken Portuguese to end with the (now famous) "chh" that you hear so often. Kids would learn this new variant straight in primary schools.
In case of invasion from Spain, the language would ensure resistance and a painful/slow path to complete assimilation in forthcoming years. Fortunately, URSS failed as a project, communism quickly failed in Portugal after economy went bankrupt, twice. Portugal and Spain joined together EU in mid 80's, both governments resumed working together as happening before 74 but the language modifications were a true success.
The population didn't realized this had happened until it was already so different from other nations that use Portuguese.
Portuguese aged today between 30 to 45 in mainland will be surprised with the ease how they can pronounce Russian correctly. Ironically, Brazilian Portuguese is truer to the original Portuguese than what you find in Portugal today.
Source: - not on the Internet, not in English language, not likely in public docs
Yeah I'll need a source to believe in all that stuff ;)
Source: any movie by Vasco Santana from the 1930's to 1950's..
Yep, many do say that.
A leading hard "R" is often pronounced like an American "H". An "OU" is sometimes pronounced like an American "ooo".
Once, at a trade show in Sao Paulo, I witnessed an unfortunate network technician trying to debug our _ROUTERS_ tell our (female) director of I.T. to please accept this ethernet-crossover cable and "put it between your hooters".
fun times.
I've got a similar story in Spanish, which to cut a long story short, results in a foreign student trying to ask a young woman 'Cuantos años tienes?' but instead asking 'Cuantos anos tienes?'! For the Spanish speakers here, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the young woman was shocked! For the non-Spanish speakers, I'll let you look up the difference between años and anos for yourself. ;-)
It's only in a computing context that 'router' rhymes with 'doubter'. I'd suggest female staff would likewise get the wrong idea if one pronounced it 'rooter'.
In the UK at least, router (in a computing context) _does_ rhyme with hooter. It is, after all, something that routes traffic -- exactly like your first example.
A router pronounced 'rowter', on the other hand, is a device for cutting grooves in wood.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/route
Contrast http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/legiti... , which correctly notes that the adjective and verb are pronounced differently.
Route 66 -> sounds like root
My usual route to work -> rhymes with doubt
Can someone reset the router -> rhymes with doubter.
In other meanings the pronunciations vary.
> Router as in the hardware always rhymes with doubter.
> I have never heard any other pronunciation for it.
I'm Australian, and we use the owl sounding router.
In the UK, it's very much a rooter sounding router.
Always funny, as here in AU root is slang for the act of copulation.
The pronunciation made Akamai's SureRoute product especially droll.
'to get into a row with someone'
For example "Few few the bird make her nest" probably means "Bit by bit a bird builds a nest". "A horse baared don't look him in the tooth" is probably "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", via the Spanish version "A caballo regalado no se le miran los dientes".
I can probably make sense of half of them. The other half are hilariously mangled beyond recognition :)
https://ciberduvidas.iscte-iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/a-ca...
One of my favourites: under 'games' is listed 'carousal', word that I hope to use daily from now on.
"Oh I say there Bart, is that a deaf I see? Why bless the fat of my leg!"
My hypothesis about this is that Portuguese has preserved some of the Latin tendency to allow arbitrary adjectives to be used as substantives (nouns). In Latin you can do this with any adjective in any context to refer to a person or thing with the specified characteristic (so "laetus" 'happy' could also mean 'a happy person', "tristis" 'sad' could also mean 'a sad person'; compare the motto of Kansas, "ad astra per aspera", which uses the adjective "aspera" as a substantive meaning 'difficult (things)').
In Portuguese you can find many adjectives that can be used in an identical form as substantives -- certainly not always, but seemingly more often than in English.
And of course pretty much any adjective can be used as a plural noun with the definite article: the French, the Dutch, the beautiful and the damned, the quick and the dead, etc.
Then there are those that fell out of use. There are Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, but never Chinamen!
"A bad arrangement is better than a process."
Which can be translated to "
> ... "um mau arranjo é melhor que um processo".
>
> Which can be translated to "a bad deal is still better than a lawsuit".
>
> Oh so Portuguese...
Sample: "I am a woman and not a test-mouse! Carlos is an everyday person who is in the orbit of a star who is being muscle-trained by him, not a sex machine."
https://www.amazon.com/cow-went-swamp-English-Portuguese/dp/...
"0.01 centuries."
Similarly, my sons watched a hilarious Let's Play of some game that had been translated too many times and had somehow ended up using the F word to mean something like "put in." So, every time you acquired an item, the game follows this formula:
"(Character name)! (item name) bag fuck"
So in the LP an early example is
"Terry! drug bag fuck"
You can play a related game with Google Translate. Start with a phrase in say, English, then translate to, say, Chinese, then Russian, then... and finally back to English. The results are often amusing, and generally become more bizarre the more languages there are in the intervening chain. Going back and forth with non-Indo-European languages seems to make the phrase diverge from its original semantics more quickly.
The English version seems to be a selection of the funniest parts.
Under "Quadruped's beasts": "Dragon".
For instance (p.58) "In the country of the blinds" should be "In land of blinds", and no plural in man or king either.
No "Castles in Spain", either, it's "castles in the clouds".
Might be the work of a bored Englishman ...
On the other hand, an Englishman would say "castles in Spain" ...
Same thing with land vs. country, although not so clear cut. The mangling is being done by someone who knows the English idioms, not an ignorant native who cannot even get basics like articles and plurals right.
In the original: Fazer torres de vento -- To build castles in Espagnish
There are several like that:
Tomar o ceo co' as maos -- Take the moon with the teeth
Ter memoria de gallo -- To have a hare memory
Comer o pao que o diabo amassou -- To eat of the cow mad (!?)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Rs