Tag: grammar

Posted in English

Article Garfunkicle

Posted on by Colin Lusk

What could be more basic than whether to say “The dog”, “A dog” or just “Dog”? It doesn’t get much simpler than that. The words “The” and “A” (or “An”) are called articles in grammar, and their portuguese equivalents are used in a roughly similar way, but there are a few areas where you can get tripped up if you’re not paying attention. So today’s blog post is one of those broccoli-and-good-intentions posts where I’m going to try and concentrate into one post everything I know (or think I know) about the use of articles.

OK, ground rules: I’ve copied the basic outline of this italki article to make sure I don’t miss anything. I’ve rewritten it though and given my own examples and ended up adding so many bits into it that even that outline is more-or-less unrecognisable. Point 6 was the hardest to rewrite because I think it’s a blind-spot for english speakers so I’ve gone off on a long digression, trying to tease it out and it’s been a very helpful exercise!

Introduction

First of all, what do we mean by definite and indefinite articles?

Definite

A definite article is used to signal that we are talking about a specific subject that is already known to the listener. If I say “the dog buried a bone”, it’s probably because you and I both know what dog we’re referring to. If not, you’d be thinking “ummm… what dog?”

Indefinite

An indefinite article is used when we’re discussing just some random thing – so in the example above, “the dog buried a bone“. So it’s just some random bone. If I’d already mentioned the bone but I referred to it as “a bone” again 10 seconds later, you’d be thinking “eh? What happened to the original bone?”

Neither

Words that don’t have an article at all are usually general ideas or generic categories of things like “love”, “humanity” or “animals”.

How is Portuguese Different from English?

The most obious way is that they are more variable because they tell you the gender and number of the noun:

Definite – Os homens, o homem, as mulheres, a mulher

Indefinite – Uns homens, um homem, Umas mulheres, uma mulher

Both types of article can be contracted with prepositions like de and em and por of course, and I’m not going to get into that but you can have a look at Mia Esmeriz’s video on the subject if that’s news to you.

When to Use Indefinite Articles in Portuguese

We use indefinite articles when:

1 Talking About Some Non-Specific Thing

Uma gaivota devorou as minhas batatas fritas

There are lots of seagulls. We’re not talking about specific one, or at least we couldn’t tell it apart from the others, it was just a casual acquaintance.

2 Mentioning The Thing For The First Time

Um homem caminhava ao longo da estrada.

The first time the man is introduced he’s just one of a mass of humans so he’s introduced as a man, “um homem”. Arguably, this isn’t really different from the first example, but in this case we’re singling out one example that will go on to be referred to using definite articles later on, whereas in the first example it’s just a passing event.

When to Use Definite Articles

3 Talking about specific things

I’m going to break this into three sections because I think there are different types here:

3a Where the Noun has Already Been Introduced or it’s Known Anyway

Um homem caminhava ao longo da estrada. O homem estava a ouvir um audiolivro

O Estado Novo foi uma ditadura

3b Possessives

This is the first difference between english and portuguese so far. Unlike in english you cant say “my dog” you have to say “the my dog”

O meu cão fala latim

Tenho de pagar uma multa à minha professora por causa das minhas erros de concordância*.

This ciberdúvidas article gives some exceptions, but these are all super-fancy and not the sort of thing that will come up every day.

  • Where the possessive goes after the noun, behaving like an adjective – ‘Aguardo notícias tuas‘
  • Where it forms part of a “forma de tratamento – ‘Sua Excelência’
  • When it’s part of a vocative (in other words, someone is calling to someone or trying to get their attention) – ‘meu amo’
  • When it’s part of a fixed expression – ‘por minha vontade’
  • When it follows a demonstrative pronoun – ‘Mostra-me esse teu sorriso transparente.’

3c In Front of Ordinary Names (First) Names

O João é um humorista

There are lots of Joãos, but we’re talking about a specific one. And for the sake of completeness:

O João é um humorista?

This time I’m talking to João and asking if he’s a comedian.

Very famous people like Colombo (the sailor, not the detective), Jesus and Maria don’t need the article because they’re above all that.

Jesus é o meu co-piloto

You’ll also use them in front of certain forms of address

O senhor

A Sra Dona Amália Costa

4 Ahead of Continents, Rivers, Islands, Most Countries

A Madeira

O Tamisa

A Europa

5 In Front of Days of the Week

Odeio As Segundas-Feiras

6 When Talking About Generic Nouns

According to the article I started with, this is a straightforward case – where you’re talking about a generic class of something, you use a definite article. He gives the following examples

Os leões vivem em África.

O álcool é mau para a saúde

Note that we are not referring to specific lions here – this isn’t a discussion about Geoff the Lion and Timmy the Lion, and nor is he saying that the alcohol in the bottle in front of him is the only alcohol that’s bad for him. He’s talking about lions in general and alcohol in all its delicious but naughty forms.

It’s sheer hubris for me to disgree with a native speaker, but I am going to do it anyway: I don’t think it’s as simple as this. I’m sure the two examples are correct, but I don’t think he’s thought through every situation where these kinds of words arise. “Os leões vivem em África” is correct, but the Wikipedia page for “Leão” includes the sentence “Leões vivem por volta de 10-14 anos na natureza, enquanto em cativeiro eles podem viver por até 30 anos.” Why no definite article there? It seems like the exact same kind of sentence. And there are dozens of examples of the word appearing without a preposition to chaperone it, so what’s going on?

Checking my favourite grammar book, I find it says to drop the article “when you’re generalising” and gives two contrasting examples

“Eu adoro flores” and “au adoro as flores perfumadas”.

That’s more like what I was expecting, but it’s a textbook and it’s not very clear on what constitutes generalising. How can we differentiate these two things

This Ciberdúvidas article tries to explain using the examples of “Ricardim gosta de música popular” and “Ricardim gosta da música popular“. Using “de” makes it a generalisation; you’re just saying what he thinks of pop music. The second one is more focused though, and it might be the answer to a question like “what’s his favourite kind of music?” You need to pick out a genre from among many, and that makes it concrete enough that it needs an article. Whew! That’s not really a distinction that exists AT ALL in english grammar.

There’s a very similar example about horror films in this Ciberdúvidas article and a couple of slightly different ones that might help illustrate the difference further:

‘Adoro desportos.’ is a generic statement about my opinion of sports that can be used in any situation, but ‘Adoro os desportos e as atividades intelectuais.’ is a more concrete statement, maybe implying that of all the possible activities, those two are being singled out.

‘Odeio pessoas arrogantes.’ is just an opinion about arrogant people in general, but ‘Odeio as pessoas arrogantes como a Rita.’ sounds more like a judgement of some annoying people among a group.someone being catty about someone in their social circle.

In found a home-grown example in this post. The title is “Ansiedade de fim de ano” (End of year anxiety). That’s a mood that can arise at any end of any year. But in the first line I talk about being “perto do final do ano” – Close to THE end of THE year, ie, the current one.

So, returning to our lions, I think “Os leões vivem na África” would work in some situations, but “Leões vivem na África e comem turistas” seems like an acceptable sentence too.

If this all feels very unfamiliar, the last two paragraphs of the second Ciberdúvidas article offer some comfort:

Hoewever it’s said that, in everyday conversation, the speakers don’t usually associate the specific or general forms with the use or absence of an article. And besides, often a sequence of words with a definite article is interpreted as generic.

So we can conclude that this difference often depends on the preference of the speaker and with other variables that don’t always have anything to do with grammatical reasons.

Carla Marques, Ciberdúvidas

When to Drop the Article Entirely?

We’ve already seen how some generic nouns sometimes go commando without a pronoun, but there are a few other cases to watch out for too:

7 Some Places On the Planet (Or Off It)

7a Most planets – but not the earth or the moon

Elon Musk quer viver em Marte

Infelizmente Elon Musk vive na Terra

7b A Few Countries

As it says in point 4, most countries DO need an article but there are some that don’t. Opinion seems divided on this one, but as far as I know the correct list is Portugal, Marrocos, Angola, Moçambique, Cuba, Israel. There are also a few where it’s optional: Espanha, Itália, França, Inglaterra

Lisboa é a capital de Portugal

Elas vivem na/em França

7c Most Towns

Most towns, on the other hand, DON’T need an article, unless they are names after some actual identifiable thing like O Porto (the Port) O Rio de Janeiro (The January River) O Funchal (the fennel patch)

Lisboa é a capital de Portugal

When is a town not a town? Well, sometimes it might be a football team. “Centenas de Adeptos Cantam Pelo Braga“. Why “Pelo” and not “Por”? Because Braga is a Clube as well as being a city, and Clube is masculine, so “o Braga” means The Football Club of Braga and that’s why it has the article.

And there’s another odd exception, given by Marco Neves in the course I took a few years ago: you can talk about “O Preston da minha adolescência” (The Preston of my youth), if you’re discussing a specific instance of the town at a point in time, for example. That’s a really niche use though and it won’t come up often.

7d Streets

Ainda há uma ciclovia na Avenida Almirante Reis?

8 When Talking About Academic Disciplines, Languages or an Instrument You Play

Falo português

O meu pai toca gaite de fole

A minha filha está a estudar informática

But if you’re talking about a specific object instead of a skill, it’s just like any other noun:

“Comprei uma gaita de fole.”

9 Means of Transport

Adoro andar de bicicleta

But of course if you’re talking about a specific vehicle, it’s just like any other noun:

Comprei uma bicicleta

10 Full Names

Since full names are more specific than first names, you don’t really need the article

Nuno Markl é o meu tio.

The grammar book says you can use an article if you want to be slightly disdainful and gives the example

O Gulbenkian tinha rios de dinheiro

11 After Other Words That Indicate Number

Words like “Qualquer” or “Vários” or just a number like “duas” usually (but not always) render the article unnecessary, just as they would in english. You don’t need to say “I’d like two the beers please” or “I drank some a beer earlier”

É provável que tenha feito vários erros neste post.

Oof, Well What a Palaver That Was!

Luckily, most of the weird stuff comes up very rarely, so don’t be put off by all the exeptions, but I am definitely going to look out for examples of abstract and generic nouns with or without articles.

Finally, I’d love to tell you that all the errors I have made have been the result of subtle linguistic distinctions like this, relating to abstract nouns, but I did an analysis and these are the facts:

* I think this is what’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy

Obrigada Cristina pelos correções, mas não corrigi o erro deliberada. 😉

Posted in English

This is the End, Beautiful Friend

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Various bits of vocabulary relating to things happening finally, at long last or in the end. I sometimes pick the wrong one. I don’t want to screw it up so I am just going to plunder the internet for examples instead of inventing any. As a basis, I have copied a lot of examples from the very helpful but slightly mind-blowing answer on this page so unless otherwise stated, that’s where they are all from, but I’ve added some other words that seem like they’re in the same area

Por fim – used to present the final result of an account: “Disse, por fim, que tudo tinha corrido tudo bem”. This seems to be pretty similar to a locution like “em resumo”

No fim – used to summarise something “Ele é muito discreto, mas, no fim, só procura a máxima diversão.” In english we might use “basically” or “deep down”

No final – a bit more straightforwardly “at the end” of something: “Ele estava no final de carreira.”

Em fim – can be synonymous with “no final de” when discussing time passing, but can also be used to discuss position in space “fica em fim da rua”. No fim can also be used to be more specific

Ao fim – used to discuss arrival at the end of a road, say. Whether you use em or a or some other preposition will depend on the verb.

No fim – similar to no final – “No fim de tanto esforço, nada conseguimos” – no final would work just as well in this sentence

Enfim is essentially em and fim glued together but it’s not a contraction in the way that “pelo” or “noutra” are; it’s an adverb that’s more or less equal to finalmente: “Chegou enfim a chuva” (from here), and it can also be used in conversation when you want to sum things up and get down to brass tacks: “Enfim, como dizem na Guerra das Estrelas, que a força esteja contigo!” (from here)

Finalmente – Finally, as in “Thank god, finally there’s an easy word to define”

Afinal – In the end. It seems to be often (but not exclusively) used at the start of the sentence, because it has a sort of summing-up effect, a bit like “at the end of the day” in english. ATEOTD is not a phrase I’m a huge fan of, but there are people who scatter it about like parmesan at an italian restaurant run by mice and my sense is that when they do it they’re more-or-less saying “afinal”.

No fim das contas or No final das contas or No fim de contas or even, god help us, Afinal de contas – there seem to be a few versions of this used by portuguese speakers and I’m sure I’ve used them all at one time or another but “no fim de contas” is the only one Priberam recognises and that’s good enough for me – it’s something like “When all is said and done” or “In the long run”: “No fim de contas, os principais ganhos em termos de desenvolvimento resultarão de uma abertura ambiciosa do comércio”

Posted in English, Portuguese

Errant Preposition Hearts Club Band

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Corrections from Português Outra Vez

Frustrating that there isn’t a preposition that sounds more like “George”. Oh well.

Ele entrou na igreja, aproximou-se dum ícone, beijou-o, persignou-se e saiu, balbuciando algo. I wrote “aproximou-se a”. Also, persignar-se (genuflected) was a new word for me!

Vocês vão para o Egito?! Só podem estar a entrar connosco (I hadn’t the faintest idea what this was even meant to be saying so took a total guess on both the verb and the preposition)

Se quisesses ser menos obeso, obedecerias às prescrições do doutor Nunes. (I used the imperative tense, but that doesn’t make sense following in from the imperfect subjunctive)

Em 2003, eu formei-me em Filologia Eslava pela Universidade de Bratislava. (i used “na” as the second preposition)

Posted in English, Portuguese

The Red Hot Silli Preppersitions

Posted on by Colin Lusk

More corrected exercises from Português Outra Vez

Grammar, we love you

Quando elas vierem a casa, lembra-lhes para regarem as flores no rés do chão.

Eu faltei aos ensaios e, por isso, não vou em digressão pelo Canadá. (I actually feel like my wrong answer wasn’t totally wrong: dedicar-se was an option so I put “dedico-me aos”. I feel like that works but the book says no No, apparently not, because the ensaios are rehearsals for the tour. Duh!)

O pai do nosso amigo Charles valeu-se do cargo que ocupa para lhe arranjar trabalho no Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros.

O presidente faltou à palavra e adotou essa lei discriminatória

Levantei-me as cinco de manhã; faltou pouco para amanhecer.

Thanks to Cristina for spotting the typos & the misunderstanding in the first version.

Posted in English, Portuguese

Vazios

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I did the compreensão da leitura test from the DAPLE (C1) exam yesterday. It’s the one available on the Universidade de Lisboa site at the bottom of the course description here. I did pretty well on most of it but the wheels really came off on the last exercise so I’m going through the answers and trying to work out why it is the way it is.

Complete o texto com as palavras que faltam nos espaços 1-20. A cada espaço corresponde apenas uma palavra. Escreva as palavras na folha de respostas.

André Nave, Diogo Madeira e Bruno Nunes são três amigos que lançaram em novembro passado um sítio na Internet [1] podemos conhecer sugestões diversas sobre a cidade de Lisboa.

O sítio, chamado Onde Lisboa, [2] recordes de popularidade. A ideia surgiu quando os
três amigos [3] a necessidade de criar um espaço virtual onde os estudantes, os
residentes e os turistas pudessem encontrar informação que não [4] dos guias turísticos, por exemplo a questão do estacionamento gratuito.

O sítio dispõe de um separador [5] exclusivamente aos estudantes. Desde locais para
fazer impressões à lista de cantinas [6], os estudantes conseguem aceder a um conjunto de informações úteis em qualquer situação. [7] além disso, há um espaço dedicado ao desporto, à cultura e ao comércio.

O André e o Diogo fazem pesquisa de campo, sendo responsáveis pela [8] de informação e de fotografias que ilustram os artigos. Acabam [9] envolver os amigos nesse processo e estão sempre disponíveis para aceitar sugestões de [10] visita o sítio. Bruno Nunes diz que é comum encontrar espaços que não se [11] referenciados na Internet.

Nesses casos, o Onde Lisboa passa a [12] uma referência na divulgação desses espaços. À [13] que os proprietários do sítio vão fazendo pesquisas, vão descobrindo [14] vez mais coisas e aí constroem novos conteúdos.

O projeto está em permanente autoavaliação e os três amigos não sabem, ainda, [15]
proporções o projeto poderá atingir. [16] que vamos ter, em breve, um Onde Porto ou um Onde Coimbra? O tempo o [17].

Para já, Bruno, Diogo e André, os três mentores desta ideia já considerada genial, [18] as suas atividades profissionais com este projeto. Não têm uma ambição desmedida para o projeto e preferem que ele [19] crescendo aos poucos. Afinal, Roma e Pavia não se fizeram num dia. E é melhor [20] pelo seguro, para não dar razão ao ditado popular “quem tudo quer tudo perde”.

in http://www.ruadebaixo.com/

  1. “Onde” or “Em que” are given as answers, but since the instructions say only one word per space, I am declaring the second one bullshit and the correct answer is Onde
  2. Bateu. It beat the record. Embarrassingly, I got the point of the sentence wrong and thought “recordes de popularidade” was the actual content of the site so I wrote “contem”. This was moronic and I like to think if I’d gone back and checked my answers I’d have spotted the idiocy, but I didn’t
  3. viram/identificaram. Straightforward enough
  4. consta. This word constar has a few different meanings here but I think the relevant one is “to be written in”. Note that it’s folled by “de” and not “em” though. I stuggled to think of a single word that fit here and ended up writing “veio” – the information didn’t came from, the tourist sites. Nope.
  5. dedicado. I wrote “reservado” which isn’t a million miles away but it’s not right
  6. disponíveis. I wrote “baratas” but there’s no need to assume they’re only talking about value for money of course. A lot of people like to travelin luxury.
  7. Para. For some reason, madness seized me and I wrote “por”. Ugh.
  8. atualização. I said “escolha” – the choice of information. Hm… I don’t think this is a terrible answer, but atualização (“update”) definitely sounds better
  9. por. Acabar por means “to end up doing…” so this makes sense
  10. quem. This is a relative pronoun referring to person so it makes sense too
  11. encontram. I didn’t notice the “se” and wrote “for”. Lack of attention there. Always read the question carefully!
  12. ser. Passar a ser means it comes to be, so this makes sense
  13. medida. “À medida que” makes a lot of sense – it means something like “to the extent that…”. For some reason, I blanked and ended up writing “proposita” instead. Wild guess, and it doesn’t even make sense because the a wouldn’t have an accent on it if it was “a propósito” (“By the way”)
  14. cada. Cada vez mais means “increasingly” or “more and more” so this makes sense
  15. que. I wrote “quantas” for reasons which seemed to make sense at the time
  16. Será. “Será que” is a sort of impactful way of leading into questions where you’re maybe a little skeptical or want to build up some expectation.
  17. dirá. the expression is obviously equivalent to “time will tell”, but I used “contar” which is used for telling a story and it should be dizer: O tempo o dirá”. Time will say it!
  18. conciliam. This verb can mean conciliate, and something like “synchronise”, but I think the sense it means here is “combine elements that are apparently divergent or incompatble” according to Priberam.
  19. vá. I wrote Anda, which is on the right lines. According to this Ciberdúvidas page, andar+gerundio is valid (it’s example 5 on the page) but ir+gerundio has more examples and it explains that teh ir+ version is more like a slow development over time, where as andar+ was more like a repetitive action, so that must be ahy anda wasn’t the correct answer
  20. jogar. Jogar pelo seguro: play it safe! Should have guessed that one, although I’d never seen it before.
Posted in Portuguese

Possessivos Alternativos

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I was told I used “sua” and “seu” too much when “dela” and “dele” might be better. Dela and dele tell you about the gender if the owner, so it can be useful when you want to emphasise that it’s her sandwich you’re talking about, not his sandwich. If you just say “sua sandes” you can’t tell. Anyway, I wrote a text on which I did it in every case. But… Well, I might have gone too far…

Vamos hoje ao centro comercial fazer as compras. A minha filha vai para universidade daqui a 17 dias…

(pausa para hiperventilação)

…e precisamos de abastacê-la de frigideiras e colheres de chá e blablabla. A sua amiga dela quer ir connosco quando formos à universidade, para ajudar no processo de nidificação mas a sua universidade dela* fica longe daqui e o carro alugado é pequeno. A sua amiga dela é simpática mas não cabe no porta-luvas. Haverá muitas caixas e malas pesadas. Quando as levarmos do carro para o seu apartamento dela, ficaremos completamente suados dela** se usarmos dela** roupas de tecido grosso

O gif lá em cima pode representar eu a pensar na perda da filha, ou o Flip a tentar corrigir esta merda.

*Well, no, because I mentioned the friend most recently, so it sounds like I’m saying the friend’s university.

**obviously replacing sua from suados and se u from se usarmos with dela is just a joke.

Thanks to Cataphract for bravely stepping in to correct this car crash!

Posted in English, Portuguese

Brasuguês Portuleiro

Posted on by Colin Lusk

The book I’m reading right now is a classic Brazilian book, “Capitães da Areia” by Jorge Amado, about a group of street kids in Salvador da Bahia in the 1930s. My edition was published by a portuguese company called LeYa, and advertised under the government’s Ler+ initiative. At first, I thought someone at the publishing house had tweaked the language to make it more understandable to portuguese readers. Let me explain why, and why I was wrong.

As you probably know, (check here if you don’t) Brazilians typically address each other as “você” in their conversation and change the verb endings accordingly. “Tu” is more common in Portugal.

What’s weird about this book is, the characters all address each other as “tu”, after the European stile, but the verb conjugations all use the você form. This looked like a mistake to me, so I went online to ask if maybe someone had screwed up at LeYa HQ.

Here’s my question in portuguese, and I’ll put a summary of the answer down below in English.

Capitães da Areia - Folha da Guarda

Estou a ler um livro brasileiro chamado Capitães da Areia, mas ao que parece a editora, Leya, mudou determinadas frases para soarem mais naturais a um leitor europeu. O resultado é… Surpreendente. Ou pelo menos eu fiquei surpreendido. Há montes de diálogo onde o pronome é “tu”, como se usa em Portugal, mas o verbo fica na terceira pessoa como se seguisse o pronome “você”

“Tu quer me fazer um favor”

e

“Tu liga para guarda?”

e

“Tu sabe, Sem-Pernas, que ele é um bicho calado”

Isto tudo está errado ou eu estou a enlouquecer? Ou… Talvez haja uma explicação melhor. É normal em PT-BR? A maior parte da história parece-me como o original (calão e vocabulário brasileiros, “trem” em vez de “comboio”, etcetera. Até há um daqueles “us” com hum… Umlaut… (Google) Trema! U com trema, que nem sequer existe em PT-PT, nem antes do AO nem depois.

Many of the replies said yes, this was a horrible disgrace, but there were quite a few brazilians who told me that all this is normal: it’s just a dialect spoken in some parts of southern Brazil. Besides, they added, the street kids haven’t really had the benefits of education, so it’s no surprise that they don’t have immaculate grammar.

There are a couple of ways of approaching the question of how to define good use of a language. The first is prescriptivism, which says there is one correct way of speaking and anything that deviates from it is wrong. The second is descriptivism, which starts from the premise that if people are speaking in a non-standard way and being understood by the people around them then they are just speaking a different version of the language, using different rules, and the linguists’s job is to describe what they’re doing, not to tell them they’re wrong. Most linguists and dictionary writers tend to be descriptivists on principle* with some exceptions**. I tend to be mostly descriptivist until someone tells me that ‘literally’ can mean ‘figuratively’, at which point I reach for my kalashnikov.

So, for example, you could argue that Brazilian portuguese is bad portuguese because it has diverged from the standard form of the language, spoken in Lisbon. But you could equally well say the same about Madeiran portuguese, or. Scouse English. In fact, if you wanted to be very hard-line about it, you could say portuguese is badly-spoken Latin since it has deviated from the language the Romans brought there in the third century BC.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that portuguese is it’s own language now, and that Brazilian portuguese is one among many dialects of Portuguese spoken in Portugal and it’s former colonies. But what about within Brazil? Is this Salvador de Bahia variant a separate dialect that has diverged and formed its own rules or are it’s speakers just hicks whose babbling would be scorned by educated people in Rio, let alonwle Coimbra?

The answer probably depends on your personality and your politics, but for me, as a learner, I just have to appreciate the book for what it is: a milestone of literature in portuguese. Let the linguists argue over the details.

If you’re studying a language, you should probably think like a prescriptivist because the people marking your work will be following a standard. If you use a você verb ending with someone you’ve addressed as tu, they won’t treat that as a delightful regional variation, they’ll just deduct marks. I made this point in what I thought was a light-hearted way to a strong descriptivist who told me “right and wrong don’t exist” when it comes to questions of language, but I got downvoted, suggesting most people disagreed. 😂

Cancelled for my prescriptivist tendencies

* If you haven’t read “The Meaning of Everything” by Simon Winchester I can recommmend it, and it addresses why early lexicographers made this choice.

**There have been some famously sarcastic and biased definitions in English dictionaries in the past. More recently, prescriptivist tendencies have come out in attempts by activists to get the meanings of words changed in order to short-circuit debate and bring about social change in a more top-down way. The most famous was this one in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder.

Posted in English

Gente

Posted on by Colin Lusk

How singular is “a gente”?

Well, first of all, it can be used as a sort of “we” pronoun as discussed a little while ago. But putting that aside, Gente usually means “the people” and it’s a bit confusing because unlike in English, it’s singular. In English youd say “The people don’t know anything” but in portuguese, “A gente não sabe nada”.

This can get a bit weird though. How long do you carry on this crazy charade that yiure taking about one person when really you might be talking about dozens?

I had an exchange with someone the other day in which I expressed disapproval of people who denounce books without reading them.

“Há gente que não LIU (…) mas DIZ (…)”
**and then in the following sentence, I just had to switch it up. I couldn’t maintain singular verb forms.
“DEVEM ler mais e falar menos.”

I asked around and thank goodness u had done the right thing.

“There is (people) that hasn’t read… but says…” Is OK as far as it goes, but when you pull into the following sentence it’s perfectly fine to treat them as a multitude again and say “They should read more and talk less”.

Posted in Portuguese

May e Might

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Nothing makes you realise quite how little you know about your own language like explaining it to someone else. This one wasn’t too bad since I’d at least thought about it before. This is me explaining the difference between the words “may” and “might”. Thanks to Dani for correcting me.

Hoje, expliquei a uma portuguesa como usar estas duas palavras inglesas. Ela pediu-me; não sou um desses homens didáticos que desabafam sobre a gramática por qualquer motivo. Antigamente, achava que compreendia a minha língua toda, mas cada vez que explico os aspetos básicos da língua, percebo que há montes de coisas que não obedecem regra nenhuma. Mas felizmente já tinha explicado may e might a mais alguém, portanto não era assim tão difícil: já tinha um esboço da explicação em mente.

Propriamente, “might” é um indicador de possibilidade e “may” tem a ver com permissão. Porém, no nosso dia-a-dia, usamos os dois de modo errado tantas vezes que esta regra não se aplica. Tenho exemplos mas não vale a pena escrever inglês neste subreddit.

Gostei de ter a oportunidade de falar em português.