As a native (Portuguese) speaker I completely understand why something like this may have appeared!
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!
The world has changed in many dimensions. Very often, what we notice and "agree" upon is merely the tip of the iceberg.
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.
Portuguese is a beautiful sounding language. I love Fado and Brazilian music. I am fluent in French and Spanish, I wish I could have learned Portuguese.
Brazilian Portuguese sounds different than Portuguese in PT; I like the sound of Brazilian. To me Portuguese from PT sounds more like something from eastern europa. Matter of taste ofcourse but I have heard that statement a lot from clients since we have offices in PT.
For years I've been wondering why Continental Portuguese sounds like an Eastern European language. Sometimes I overhear people speaking some Eastern European language and my first impression is that they are speaking Portuguese, but then I realize I can't understand what they're saying (I'm a native Portuguese speaker).
Being Brazilian, Continental Portuguese sounds awful to me. But then I've heard many Portuguese people saying that Brazilian Portuguese sounds awful to them :)
This happened after 1974 when the country had lost the decade-long proxy war against USA and URSS. As price to pay, the territories outside Europe were turned by the winning party into independent nations.
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
Eu também gostava de ver este tipo de coisas publicadas. Infelizmente lá teremos de esperar mais algumas décadas com o povo tuga a pensar que o seu sotaque mudou da noite para dia por "magia".. ^_^
Some of the funniest (Brasilian) Portuguese misunderstandings I've encountered were due to differences in how some letters are pronounced.
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".
Indeed, my girlfriend, a Brazilian, is teaching me Portuguese. I have real trouble pronouncing the kind of implied "m" and the end of "pão", without which, instead of meaning bread, turns out to mean penis/cock/dick. "Eu como pão" is something I have to be very careful with.
On a related note, most of speakers of East-European languages have hard time with word pairs like "bitch"/"beech" and "shit"/"sheet". Number of "spreadshits" heard at some meetings can't leave anybody cold =)
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. ;-)
In my part of the Commonwealth, 'route' does rhyme with 'hoot'. "If you go that route, you'll get stuck in traffic".
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'.
I thought the 'rowter' pronunciation re. computing was a purely American influence.
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.
Americans rhyme "route" (path) with "doubt" and "row" (paddle a boat) with "dough". If you are rhyming "row" (fight) with "cow", that's a word most Americans don't know.
The usual distinction is "to route" rhymes with "to doubt" and the word "route" is pronounced like "root". Some people also use the verb pronunciation for the noun as well.
Router as in the hardware always rhymes with doubter. I have never heard any other pronunciation for it. Route as a verb in IT always rhymes with doubt.
To me (US), 'route' might rhyme with 'hoot' or 'stout' according to whim. (Compare the American "Route 66".) A router would always use the MOUTH vowel, though.
Interestingly, although I speak no Portuguese or French, I can sort of understand some of the sayings, by mentally translating them back in a literal way to Spanish.
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 :)
Some of the proverbs seem to have French origin, e.g. nothing some money, nothing of Swiss is a bad translation of Point d’argent, point de Suisse (No money, no Swiss [mercenaries]).
I actually feel sorry for poor Pedro Carolino — he obviously put a lot of work into his little book (even if it was horribly misguided), and people have been laughing at it for over a century!
It definitely sounds silly in English, but it's still idiomatic Portuguese today ("um surdo").
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.
No shame there, I'm sure you speak English far better than I do whichever language is native to you. Now, if you decided to publish a phrase book based on your current knowledge, then we'd be having a bit of a laugh.
It’s a common error among English learners, particularly when it comes to nationalities. We would say “I am French” or “I am a French person”, but never “I am a French”.
Made even more confusing that you can do it with some nationalities but not others. So "a French" is out, but most nationalities ending "-an" are OK: an American, a German, an Afghan, a Norwegian, a Russian, an Italian. Also "-ese", though with something of an archaic air: a Chinese, a Maltese, a Portugese. Also a Swiss, an Argentine, an Israeli, because why not?
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.
What's more, some nationalities have specific nouns for them, but not all. A Spanish person is a Spaniard, a Finnish person is a Finn, but a German person isn't a Germ.
Then there are those that fell out of use. There are Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, but never Chinamen!
Ha ha, this reminds me of a Madonna interview in English, translated to Hungarian, then back to English. Unfortunately it was fake, but nonetheless pretty funny.
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."
Reminds me of Millor Fernandes's "The cow went to the swamp — A vaca foi pro brejo", which is a book of Brazilian Portuguese sayings translated literally to English. Pretty amusing.
I submit that a work of art with "a legacy that has lasted centuries" should be more than ~1.6 of them old - no matter how little I can deny that 1.6 or so is indeed enough to qualify for the plural.
It is presumed that Carolino wrote the book through the aid of a Portuguese-to-French dictionary and a French-to-English dictionary, using the former for an initial translation of a word or phrase from Portuguese, and the latter to convert it from French into English. The result, of course, is a mishmash of cloudy gibberish.
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:
Definitely a classic. I've been using "spits in the coat" for a long time, e.g. "[local coffee roaster] spits in Starbucks' coat."
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.
Created https://speaklikeabrazilian.com to help an Irish friend in Brazil to get used to expressions that would be literally translated as "cucumber" or "to put up a tent" but that have a completely different meaning.
That's quite a conclusion you've reached with such little information. One of the points stated is that it might have been translated to French and then English, but not information on what exact dictionary might have been used. A lot of dictionaries will, though, give you a lot of possible translations for the same word, that combined with the necessity of grammatically putting them together could create such a messy non-sensical work... or it could be fake, who knows.
It's kind of hard to make "castles in Spain" appear in any literal translation, if the wording in the source language mentions the clouds instead of Spain.
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.
Apparently he knew the English version of that one (or, as rodelrod said, he just translated the French translation from a Portuguese-French guide. That would somewhat explain the strange word "Espagnish").
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 (!?)
Indeed. Say you want to change Wikipedia to better reflect your whims and opinions. (1) Post your notions on Hacker News. (2) Cite the HN comment from Wikipedia. I'm not recommending people do this, I'm just saying you could.
Umm no you can't. Hacker News comments are not considered reliable sources [0] because they are self-published [1]. The only exceptions would be if the subject of the article is talking about themselves, or if the commenter is an established subject expert. (Not meaning that they have a degree in it or are good at their job, but are widely considered an expert such as Dennis Ritchie on C) Even then the former is only meant for specific cases [2] and higher quality sources are always preferred. If any average joe could talk on a topic and include their opinion in Wikipedia because it was "published", it would not be the high quality resource it is today and that is also why the concept of what makes a reliable source isn't so intuitive.
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!