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The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

hackingportuguese.com

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Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#51

Post by paol »

forinti wrote: post #38
paol wrote: post #27

Just a heads up for non-portuguese speakers: brazilian portuguese and european portuguese can differ quite extremely in pronunciation. Then there's also african portuguese pronunciations, though to my ear those tend to be closer to the european. The article is written from a brazilian standpoint, so keep that in mind when comparing with your own experiences of the language.

Brazilians have a hard time understanding European Portuguese (I think that pronoun placement is a major factor other that the actual phonetics - they just don't expect certain phrases). And I've also heard from Portuguese that they find Brazilians easier to understand than some of their own compatriots, especially now that telenovelas have spread Brazilian vocabulary in Portugal.

Yes, I think the asymmetry is entirely due to Portuguese people being regularly exposed to Brazilian pronunciation, whereas the reverse is much rarer.

In the late 80's & 90's Portugal started importing TV programs from Brazil. Since the 2000's this happens much less, but that has been replaced by a large number of Brazilian immigrants settling in Portugal.

As far as I can tell there are no equivalent influences going in the other direction, so Brazilians are rarely exposed to Portuguese pronunciation.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#52

Post by darkwater »

diego_moita wrote: post #43
darkwater wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even some Spanish dialects like Galego have the same r You are opening a can of worms here considering that Galego is officialy a language, not a dialect, and it's basically very very similar to Portoguese, up to a point in which a galician colleague of mine, when we were at a conference in the USA would talk in Galego with a couple of Brazilian guys and they talked to him in Brazilian Portoguese and they went alon…

> You are opening a can of worms here considering that Galego is officialy a language, not a dialect, and it's basically very very similar to Portoguese, True, you are right. I stand corrected. The difference between a language and a dialect is often just politics.

> The difference between a language and a dialect is often just politics.

Indeed! It can be defined by loosing or winning a war. If you win, it's a language; if you loose, it's a dialect.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#53

Post by xwolfi »

marcodiego wrote: post #9

Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk about popular artists and TV, there are some which are popular in the whole country. This makes the people well aware of how people from different parts of the country speak and, naturally, people have developed a "common way to speak" that can sound "neutral" to…

As a French what I find insane is that I can sorta read it (and I suppose Portuguese can decypher French too), but I do not get what they say at all. Italian, Spanish or Romanian I can, but Portuguese is like totally alien - I wonder how the pronunciation of Latin could derive so much from Italian.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#54

Post by kortex »

bradrn wrote: post #5

This is an excellent article! However, I find the definition of phonemes very unsatisfying: > Phonemes are not exactly the same thing as sounds, and they’re not exactly the same thing as letters. They are kind of like connecting categories that map letters to sounds … Phonemes are a way of saying, If you see a letter “r” is this situation, use Sound A for it. If you see “r” in this other situation, use a different So…

(Not saying you are wrong, I'm trying to clear up my misconceptions) I didn't realize that phonemes were perceptually distinct units of sound, in the same way graphemes are visually distinct units. (yes there is the whole "some speakers recognize different sounds in their brain as the same" wrinkle).

What would the term be for units of sound which are perceptually distinct regardless of listener's perspective? E.g. [p] and [pʰ] are non-phonemic in English but are in Korean, and you can tell them apart with a spectrogram. Or is that just not a distinction linguists make?

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#55

Post by mlinhares »

xwolfi wrote: post #53
marcodiego wrote: post #9

Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk about popular artists and TV, there are some which are popular in the whole country. This makes the people well aware of how people from different parts of the country speak and, naturally, people have developed a "common way to speak" that can sound "neutral" to…

As a French what I find insane is that I can sorta read it (and I suppose Portuguese can decypher French too), but I do not get what they say at all. Italian, Spanish or Romanian I can, but Portuguese is like totally alien - I wonder how the pronunciation of Latin could derive so much from Italian.

This is really surprising, Portuguese is pretty close to Spanish (it is derived directly from Spanish) so other than the nasal vowels it tracks pretty close to it, it also has a considerable vocabulary of words that sound pretty close to their Italian counterparts.

I've never heard an Italian or Spanish person say they can't understand anything in a spoken Portuguese conversation.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#56

Post by pantuza »

We pronounce 'r' in Portuguese as 'h' in english words. For example: the word 'mice' in Portuguese is 'rato' which we pronounce as if it was 'hato'. Similar to 'hat', 'hate' or 'hit'.

But never as the english word 'rat'. For us it sounds like 'rrrrrrrat', because the 'r' is too long in the pronunciation.

Summarizing: Portuguese don't use long 'r' phonemes when the word starts with 'r'. We usually pronounce as if the word starts with 'h' in english.

The long 'r' is used when 'r' or 'rr' appears in the middle of the words.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#57

Post by [deleted] »

xwolfi wrote: post #53
marcodiego wrote: post #9

Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk about popular artists and TV, there are some which are popular in the whole country. This makes the people well aware of how people from different parts of the country speak and, naturally, people have developed a "common way to speak" that can sound "neutral" to…

As a French what I find insane is that I can sorta read it (and I suppose Portuguese can decypher French too), but I do not get what they say at all. Italian, Spanish or Romanian I can, but Portuguese is like totally alien - I wonder how the pronunciation of Latin could derive so much from Italian.

[deleted]

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#59

Post by [deleted] »

mlinhares wrote: post #55
xwolfi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a French what I find insane is that I can sorta read it (and I suppose Portuguese can decypher French too), but I do not get what they say at all. Italian, Spanish or Romanian I can, but Portuguese is like totally alien - I wonder how the pronunciation of Latin could derive so much from Italian.

This is really surprising, Portuguese is pretty close to Spanish (it is derived directly from Spanish) so other than the nasal vowels it tracks pretty close to it, it also has a considerable vocabulary of words that sound pretty close to their Italian counterparts. I've never heard an Italian or Spanish person say they can't understand anything in a spoken Portuguese conversation.

[deleted]

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#60

Post by kortex »

As a GAE native speaker quite comfortable with [ɹ] (inverted r), the voiced [post]alveolar approximant, I find this sound super fascinating. It's very rare in languages, suggesting it is very unusual phonetically, but it happens to be prominent in two of the most widely-spoken languages, so many speakers can pronounce it.

I've always found alveolar trills more aesthetically pleasing, but you casually drop them in English conversation and you get weird looks and questions.

Question for the peanut gallery: what the heck is the difference between the voiced alveolar approximant and the r-colored vowel, ɝ, (schwa plus hook)? They have different IPA so presumably they have distinct pronunciation, but I cannot hear a difference, nor can I feel a difference in my tongue placement when I say them.

Also, curse HN's lack of unicode support. ~~I think it's related to MySql's stupid utf8 is actually utf8mb3 thing~~. I think they rendered? I see it in my comment after posting, but they are blank squares in the text form.

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