Falatório

tchrist

16:19

@Centaurus There you are!

Were your examples of falar-lhe uma coisa (instead of dizer-lhe uma coisa) ones that are only heard, or do they also occur in writing in Brazil?

With a verdade excepted.

Centaurus

16:54

@tchrist That's in the spoken language. It's quite common to say "Vou falar o que penso" and "vou dizer o que penso" and I don't see any difference. When I write I try to follow rules or what sounds more educated.

tchrist

I wouldn't usually say the first version in EN, FR, ES. However, there is also the idiom of speaking one's mind.

I'm really sad that Google Ngrams doesn't work for PT.

Não sei se falta isso para o futebol. cada um tem uma personalidade. Não me incomoda câmera, microfone... Vou falar o que penso e f... o resto - disse.

@Centaurus Apparently it does get said. Hm.

I would never speak what I think, only say what I think.

ANeves

In Brasil, it does. Not in Portugal; it sounds brasilian, and pt-PT speakers are snobbish about that.

tchrist

Heh. :) Aren’t you Portuguese yourself? :)

ANeves

I am. But as verdades são para se dizer...

;)

Centaurus

A prescriptivist would condemn several. l uses in spoken ptBR, but most people don't even notice you've said "dizer" where "falar" would be the right word

You get away with several slips in the spoken language. There are, however, some serious mistakes that an educated person won't forgive:

tchrist

17:07

Dizer can be a funny one. People first coming to English with dizer in mind will often confuse say and tell.

Centaurus

e.g. some illiterate or semi-literate people say "menas" instead of "menos" before a feminine word and that is unacceptable and is also a label (I'm illiterate).

). Another common mistake in Portuguese is to use "mim" when it is after a preposition but before a verb and is the subject of the verb. e.g.

Ele pediu pra "mim" fazer, instead of the correct "para eu fazer". I would say 40% of the people make that mistake and it is also sort of a label

tchrist

Ouch.

Wait, it's that common? Really?

Things that are that common start to become "differently grammatical" from a descriptive (rather than normative) view point.

Centaurus

I'm not Portuguese born but I have Portuguese and Brazilian citizenship. My mother is Portuguese but has been in Brazil for several decades. I still have relatives in Portugal, though, and we visit them every other year.

tchrist

Oh I see. For some reason I had thought you French.

May I ask where in Portugal your family are from, if anywhere in particular?

Centaurus

Yes, but you can get away with some mistakes if they are not exclusive of the poor and the illiterate. Dê isso pra mim ver" is common among the semi-literate but frowned upon by educated people with a university degree.

tchrist

17:13

Does anyone know where to find the population of Brazil in say, the year 1600 or the year 1700?

ANeves

Ugh... no idea, that sounds tricky to find.

tchrist

@Centaurus I wonder whether this is new. English as you know uses the object pronoun for the subject of an infinitive clause, although of course Portuguese does not. Spanish and French don't tolerate those clauses at all.

@ANeves The reason I ask is because I have a rough idea that Central and South America (compared with North America) have been more richly colonized by Europeans by at least a full century. And I was wondering if this didn't do more to explain the linguistic diversity in Brazil than land mass alone.

Centaurus

I have family in O Porto and in the Azores. I also have a lot of cousins who migrated to the US (Southern California) and the second and third generation are American born. I also have portuguese relatives in Toronto. The Portuguese can be found everywhere, even in Australia.

ANeves

http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/populacao/censohistorico/1872_1920.shtm
This might help a bit.
http://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/historia/censo-de-1872-unico-registrar-populacao-escrava-esta-disponivel-7275328
There seems to be accessible info online. Do you want help looking it up?

tchrist

My neighbor two doors down has half his family from the Azores and half from Portugal proper.

@ANeves It's idle curiosity.

But his "cisatlantic" family live in New England.

I've never made it to either the Azores or the Canaries. I feel like I'm missing something.

Centaurus

17:18

@tchrist I lived in New England (Central Mass.) for two years during my fellowship years. Fantastic landscape.

tchrist

I very much like the tree colors in autumn there.

Centaurus

The fall folliages.... I would spend hours taking pictures during the weekends.

tchrist

I wonder if there is any way to actually measure how far apart dialects are from each other. I feel like European and American versions of English aren't so far apart as those of Portuguese.

Centaurus

And I can recall very cold winters, sometimes below 0ºF

tchrist

Yes, that's when it starts to be truly cold.

When salt no longer melts ice.

That's why 0ºF was chosen in case you didn't know.

Well, the main part of why at least.

I do not miss those weeks in winter when you never saw positive Fahrenheit degrees for days and days on end.

Centaurus

17:23

I think the AmE is more homogeneous than BrE. Although the UK is much smaller than the US, there seems to be regionalisms and many more dialects than the AmE.

tchrist

@Centaurus This is certainly true. It is generally accepted that the longer a linguistic community has existed, the more splinters it gains. Papua New Guinea is especially notable in this regard.

I've always thought a mountainous terrain might also contribute to that isolating effect, but Britain has no mountains worthy of the name.

Centaurus

I've also visited my cousins in Toronto in January/February and it's just as cold. We don't have snow in Brazil, never in Rio, and my daughters were eager to see a lot of it, so we chose to go in the winter. Most unpleasant to be outdoors. We visited Niagara Falls but couldn't stay outdoors very long.

tchrist

I am from Wisconsin, which is about the same as Toronto.

I live now in Colorado at 40 degrees North latitude and 5600 feet of elevation, which somewhat compensates for the more southerly location.

Centaurus

I've been to Rochester, Minn, once, for a cardiovascular review course at the Mayo Foundation.

tchrist

When a friend from Lisbon visited me here in Colorado one summer, we went up to the mountains so he could "meet" snow for the first time in his life.

Rochester is cold!

So the "more splinters" theory is why I'm looking for how long how many people have been speaking Portuguese in Brazil.

Centaurus

17:29

I've also been to Minneapolis for a two week couse on pacemakers at the Medtronic Company. Great! Everything paid for. Pick up at the airport, hotel, transportation and meals every day.

tchrist

They probably wanted to make sure you didn't freeze to death. :)

Centaurus

It was early October but there were some flurries already.

ANeves

@Centaurus "Oporto" :'(

Centaurus

@ANeves Yes, Oporto in English, thanks.

I love Oporto, I would live there if I could.

tchrist

It is. But just Porto in Portuguese. I'm not 100% clear on how English got Oporto, although it isn't a far leap.

ANeves

17:33

;_;

Nooo... everytime someone adds an o to Porto's name, a francesinha's soul is dragged to hell!

tchrist

heh

Did you edit the Wikipedia page to take out normally, too? :)

ANeves

I did.

Centaurus

Well, in Portuguese Porto is masculine, but we say "no Porto", "vou ao Porto", "estive no Porto", unlike Lisbon which is neutral. (em Lisboa)

tchrist

@ANeves Very good!

ANeves

Hmm hmm. There was a whole question about that; the adding or not of the article to the... preposition?

tchrist

17:36

@Centaurus I know. I cannot begin to explain it, just usually know what feels right.

Centaurus

@tchrist Are you more fluent in Spanish than in Portuguese?

tchrist

@Centaurus I'm fluent in Spanish. I can read Portuguese fluently but it takes me time to generate it or to translate it to English.

I don't translate to English when I read.

And, frustratingly, I have a much harder time parsing spoken Portuguese in Portugal than I do in Brazil.

Because if only I knew which words they were saying, I would understand them just fine.

The problem is hearing which word is which.

It's an ear-training thing. It takes a few months before it all snaps into place.

Centaurus

I never had a formal study of the Spanish Language but I've been to Argentine a few times and to Spain once and had no trouble to communicate in what we call "Portunhol" (a mixture of both languages)

tchrist

It's because of the syllable reduction in spoken Portuguese in Portugal.

ANeves

@tchrist Don't worry, Brasilians have the same problem...

tchrist

17:41

I really like how spoken Portuguese sounds, which is why it frustrates me not to be able to tell which word is being said.

And watching movies doesn't help when they're all in Brazilian.

Centaurus

Well, there are places in Portugal where I can't understand what they say. Not in the large cities, but in the hinterland. The same in Brazil. We once had a janitor who had just come from the Brazilian Northeast to work at the condo where I live. I had to ask him to repeat several times the same sentence so I could understand him.

tchrist

@Centaurus Spanish-speakers and Portuguese-speakers can read each other's newspapers easily enough.

It is a bit harder for Spanish and Italian speakers to make themselves understood to each other, but con buona voluntà, this too is possible.

Centaurus

Yes, and I've found it's the same with Danish and Swedish newspapers, and those nationals.

tchrist

Danish and Norwegian are often cited as an interesting one-way case of intelligibility, just like Spanish and Portuguese.

It is much easier for a Lisboeta to understand a Madrileño than vice versa, although reading is the same. I believe the direction is that Danes understand Norwegian speech more readily than the other way around.

Centaurus

I've been to Italy and I could make myself understood. Of course I wouldn't understand ordinary conversation between two Italians, but if someone is willing to be patient we may understand perhaps 50% of what we mean.

Yes, there is this linguistic asymetry.

tchrist

17:46

@Centaurus Yes exactly. I've had the same experience. I did take a few Italian classes at university, but really, the intonation pattern is close enough that at least when they said a word I did not know, I still could know which word it was that they had said.

So I could identify which word it was, and even later look it up if I wanted. With European Portuguese, the entire phrase drops out, even when I know 95% of the words.

Centaurus

Ever been to Galicia? Their language sounds more like Portuguese than Castillan Spanish. It's true that their language and that of Northern Portugal were one language once.

tchrist

Galicia and northern Portugal is really the only place I haven't been to in Iberia.

The degree to which Galician and Portuguese are different languages or not is to some extent a political question more than it is a linguistic one.

Certainly I had to study As Cantigas de Santa Maria while I was in college.

Centaurus

They use "a" and not "la" as article. The city is called "A Coruña" but Madrileños call it "La Coruña"

tchrist

One point of view is that Galician really is Portuguese spelled as though it were Castilian.

ANeves

@tchrist We could advise some movies or series that you could watch. :)

tchrist

17:51

@ANeves Yes please!

Centaurus

Yes, had there not been a political division, it would be the same language to this day.

tchrist

@Centaurus Agree.

The Felipe problem. :)

ANeves

> It's true that [the galician] language and that of Northern Portugal were one language once.

I thought Galaico-Português gave origin to galician and portuguese, and not just the language of north Portugal?

tchrist

Yes.

Centaurus

Don't you pick up Portuguese channels in Colorado ? We can pick them here, at least two of them on cable TV.

tchrist

17:53

Galaico-Português is the ancestor language to both.

@Centaurus I don't have TV. :)

Do you know the album "Visions and Miracles" by the group Ensemble Alcatraz? It has the Cantigas.

ANeves

If only there was a way to watch TV without having a TV...
http://www.rtp.pt/play/ :p

tchrist

There you go, thanks!

Centaurus

@ANeves As you know better than I, Portugal was born in the north. The south came later, after the re-conquest. That's why I said the language spoken in Northern Portugal.

@tchrist You can always find some Portuguese programs on youtube.

tchrist

Everything was born in the North.

Well, in Iberia at least.

ANeves

@tchrist I advise "Os Filhos do Rock". It's a... series? about the spread of rock in Portugal in the 80s.
http://www.rtp.pt/play/p1366/os-filhos-do-rock

It follows a group of friends that build their own rock band.

tchrist

17:58

Cantiga 103

Centaurus

@tchrist and @ANeves Gotta go now. It was a pleasure talking to you informally and getting to know you a little.

tchrist

Yes, thanks for chatting!

ANeves

Cheers!

Burninate it.

tchrist

For some reason it is not on YouTube.

Translation of Cantiga 103 from Galaico-Português to modern Portuguese.

There are eight tracks on the album.

-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist  12.8M Mar 24  2003 1-Quen a Virgen ben servira.ogg
-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist   7.1M Mar 24  2003 2-Fontis in rivulum.ogg
-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist   8.7M Mar 24  2003 3-Connoscudamente mostre miragres.ogg
-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist  26.1M Mar 24  2003 4-Alanvanca de Mudanza.ogg
-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist  12.5M Mar 24  2003 5-Toda cousa que aa Virgen.ogg
-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist  18.3M Mar 24  2003 6-Gran dereit.ogg
-rw-r--r--  1 tchrist  tchrist  14.0M Mar 24  2003 7-Ad honorem salvatoris.ogg

They also have a Cantigas de Amigo album, and that one appears to be available on YouTube.

Ensemble Alcatraz e Kitka - Cantigas de Amigo - Rosa das Rosas

►

Cantigas de Amigo - Enas Verdes Ervas

►

Quen a Virgen ben servira (Cantiga de Santa Maria No. 103)

►

Oh good, that was one is there now. It didn't used to be.

ANeves

http://www.rtp.pt/play/p1683/historia-a-historia
Este também parece interessante.
Episódios da História de Portugal, contados por Fernando Rosas, um influente da política de esquerda de Portugal.
( http://www.esquerda.net/artigo/uma-viagem-pela-historia-de-portugal-com-o-professor-fernando-rosas/34954 )

tchrist

18:07

Obrigado!

We had to study the Camino de Santiago in college. It was an important peregrination.

The pilgrims wore shells of vieiras to identify themselves.

ANeves

And two last interesting series:
- O Povo Que Ainda Canta http://www.rtp.pt/play/p1687/o-povo-que-ainda-canta , about... traditional songs
- Portugueses no Mundo http://www.rtp.pt/play/p518/portugueses-no-mundo , about the lives of the Portuguese living abroad now

I remember an answer you gave about the c-cedil. I like your solid linguistic background. :)

tchrist

But only about Iberia or England. I don't know much about say, Germany philology.

ANeves

"only" :)

I'd wager that... 95% of the pt.SE have no formal knowledge about philology.

As a matter of fact, I learned the word philology a few months ago myself!

tchrist

It's more common in non-English than in English.

And it was once used as more of a synonym for linguistics.

My course of study the year I attended the Complutense in Madrid was titled "Filología española".

And J.R.R. Tolkien considered himself a philologist.

ANeves

That guy was a jerk!! Ruined many a night of sleep on account of his writing...

tchrist

18:18

Oh my yes you would have.

I know it is very hard, but reading it in translation would lose so much.

Here's the OED:

> philology /fɪˈlɒlədʒɪ/.
Etymology: In Chaucer, ad. L. philologia; in 17th c. prob. a. Fr. philologie, ad. L. philologia, a. Gr. φιλολογία, abstr. sb. from φιλόλογος fond of speech, talkative; fond of dicussion or argument; studious of words; fond of learning and literature, literary; f. φιλο- philo- + λόγος word, speech, etc.

1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning. Now rare in g…

> 3. spec. (in mod. use) The study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. Now usu. restricted to the study of the development of specific languages or language families, esp. research into phonological and morphological history based on written documents. (Really one branch of sense 1.)

This sense has never been current in the U.S. Linguistics is now the more usual term for the study of the structure of language, and, with qualifying adjective or adjective phrase, is replacing philology even in the restricted sense.

It isn't used much.

The term has been supplanted by linguistics in the States.

@ANeves I hope you know that not 1 native speaker out of 10,000 knows all the words Tolkien used.

And probably fewer.

I remember a friend from Portugal whose letters had all kinds of old-fashioned language in them the month he read Tolkien.

ANeves

I meant more in the sense of addicting people to his books, and less in the sense of the complicated language. A "professional amateur" reader knows how to simply imagine meanings for them.

hehe

You know, a similar thing that happens is that in Portugal we translate to English using the romance loanwords which are more familiar to us; our English tends to be dense and hard to read.

tchrist

There are worse books to become an aficionado of.

Yes, because all the Latinate cognates are from a high register in English, but in Romance they might be perfectly quotidian. :)

It sometimes goes the other way. You will have English speakers just learning Spanish saying consecuentemente instead of por eso.

ANeves

Naturally.

tchrist

18:49

Are any of these usually pejorative in Portuguese? amigão, amigalhão, amigalhote, amigaço

ANeves

Those feel pt-BR to me. None of them feel pejorative.
Amigalhote or amigalhaço (with -lha-) would not be surprising to be heard in Portugal.

tchrist

The stub for Aumentativo is, well, stubby.

Aumentativo

Na língua portuguesa, o aumentativo é o grau do substantivo que se forma por acrescentamento de um sufixo, geralmente "ão" ou "zão". Cachorro - Cachorrão Mesa - Mesão Festa - Festança Janela - Janelão Além desses, pode-se misturar (informalmente) o aumentativo com o diminutivo como nos sufixos "ebrão", "etão" e "egulhão": Casa - Casebrão(formalmente: casarão) Muro - Muretão(formalmente: muralha) Pedra - Pedrita O aumentativo serve funções estilísticas e pragmáticas bem definidas, como evidenciar afeto ou ironia, por exemplo. Outro grau dos substantivos é chamado diminutivo, por oposição ao ...

I was looking for a page like this, which has only a Spanish version:

Despectivo

El despectivo es un afijo por el medio del cual se forma una palabra derivada con significado negativo, irónico o de desprecio para designar que algo o alguien es malo, feo, sin forma o gracia, de mal gusto, etc. Este tipo de derivación es típico de las lenguas romances; el idioma español es especialmente rico en sufijos despectivos y los utiliza tanto en sustantivos como en adjetivos. == Sufijos despectivos en español == Algunas palabras pueden usar más de un sufijo para su forma despectiva, pero generalmente la mayoría sólo acepta un sufijo específico. Es de notar que una buena cantidad...

Augmentatives and pejoratives are not completely overlapping.

You can have an augmentative suffix that does not automatically make it pejorative, for example. It is just frequent enough, and sometimes depends on the accepted common meaning for a suffixed word that lives long enough to take on its own meaning.

Or maybe Portuguese just does not have so very many ways of making nouns sound nasty as Spanish does. :)

ANeves

19:07

Can you give me an example of an augmentative that is pejorative while the normal adjective is not? I can't find one.

tchrist

For adjectives, I'm not sure. Usually it is nouns. But mujerona and amigote are really nice things to call someone in Spanish.

And mariconazo is not a nice word either.

Mujeraca

Don't say those. :)

ANeves

Nouns then.
Mulheraça? It's a good one.

tchrist

Is that positive or negative?

ANeves

Very positive, except if someone feels like you're objectifying.

tchrist

Interesting.

ANeves

19:10

Mulherão could be either, depending on context.

tchrist

Might the positive use be about her importance and the negative about her physical size in a negative way?

ANeves

heading home; be back in a while

yes, pretty much

i'll ewxplain :)

tchrist

See ya!

I don't think the augmentatives and pejoratives are as easily charted out by region like that.

As distintas conotações atribuídas aos sufixos

O pejorativo na sufixação

That second one is pretty good. The first one, blah.

A expressão da pejoratividade

> "Neste processo
de derivação, -ão acumula duas cargas semânticas: além de
ser o responsável pelo significado de agente, presente nas
formas derivadas, indica a repetição excessiva, abusiva da
ação expressa pelo radical verbal". E acrescenta: "Este seu
segundo significado é o que nos interessa fundamentalmente,
pois é nele que está contida a pejoratividade dessas forma-
ções agentivas."

Definitely the most detailed reference I have so far discovered.

> No Português Brasileiro, os falantes frequentemente utilizam o sufixo –eco não somente para indicar pequenez, mas também para expressar a atitude subjetiva do falante, assumindo um valor positivo ou negativo. Deste modo, o sufixo –eco pode apresentar diversas significações a depender do contexto em que está inserido.

Oh, is it the Brazilians who write no Português Brasileiro with initial capitals as though it were English? (instead of writing no português brasileiro as I would have expected)

Oh cool, that one has lots of examples.

João de Barros

21:28

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According to the Area51 page for Portuguese Language Stack Exchange, we need to improve some things here: Improve the visits per day; Improve the answer ratio; Improve the questions per day; improve the avid users (improve the other 3, this also improves); So, I'm open this discussion to ge...

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