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The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

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Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#111

Post by andrepd »

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…

Even Portugal, a small country of 10 million people / 100k km^2, has quite a lot of linguistic diversity.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#112

Post by quirino »

lhorie wrote: post #98

A discussion of Portuguese Rs wouldn't be complete without at least a mention of Jimmy Five[0] (aka Cebolinha), a character in the Monica's Gang cartoon. > Due to dyslalia, Jimmy Five is incapable of pronouncing the letter "r", replacing it with the letter l, in the Portuguese version, or with the letter w, in the English version. When the letter is used at the end of a word, however, he pronounces it normally (as in…

Here are the main characters from Monica's Gang:

- Monica (Mônica) - has ludicrous physical strength (quite easily the strongest person in the world in the cartoon). Gets made fun of by the boys for her big front teeth and responds by hitting them with her blue stuffed rabbit.

- Jimmy Five (Cebolinha) - Can't pronounce some words properly (as described above). Has exactly 5 strands of hair on his head and is always trying to steal Monica's rabbit, in an attempt to become the "owner of the street".

- Maggy (Magali) - REALLY likes to eat, is able to do so indefinitely. Many stories revolve around how quickly and much she can eat. Is often seen with a big slice of watermelon on her hands.

- Smudge (Cascão) - Has never taken a shower and is extremely afraid of water. The canon is that Smudge has never even touched a single drop of water in his life. Even has his own set of supervillains whose only goal is to get him to take a shower.

This is not even the tip of the iceberg of the shenanigans and characters from these comics. Monica's gang is such a special part of Brazilian culture and I hope someday it gets the international recognition it deserves.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#113

Post by tombh »

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…

You got me thinking about minimal pairs of /p/ and /pʰ/ in English (at least my British English anyway). I'm not a linguist, but is this not a minimal pair?

    Mice pour (water into a jug)
    My spore (as opposed to your spore)
Or can minimal pairs not cross word boundaries?

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#114

Post by rglullis »

lhorie wrote: post #98

A discussion of Portuguese Rs wouldn't be complete without at least a mention of Jimmy Five[0] (aka Cebolinha), a character in the Monica's Gang cartoon. > Due to dyslalia, Jimmy Five is incapable of pronouncing the letter "r", replacing it with the letter l, in the Portuguese version, or with the letter w, in the English version. When the letter is used at the end of a word, however, he pronounces it normally (as in…

I think Maurício de Souza is an underrated genius and Turma da Mônica is the first and best example that comes to my mind when I'm overseas and get asked about Brazilian culture. But please, let's not measure its virtues by some broken standards like Identity Politics.

I mean, yes, they have "diversity" and I think they have "minority representation done right" but - unlike any example of modern American cultural production - they don't do it to "tick checkboxes". The art and the stories come first. The characters are there to support the story, not to push some agenda.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#115

Post by throwaway599281 »

pantuza wrote: post #56

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…

>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.

Either I didn't understand what you mean or I have never seen any Portuguese native speaker (including me) pronouncing it like you say we do.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#116

Post by oblio »

pdpi wrote: post #64
mlinhares wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Italians and Spaniards should have an easy time understanding at least some Brazilian portuguese. European Portuguese is _really_ hard, though, because our vowels are all sorts of weird. When I moved to London, it really struck me how people speaking Russian sounded to me like they were speaking Portuguese, which always forced a double take when I tried to “tune in” and realised it wasn’t my own language.

He he. That's partly why we make fun of you as the most Western Eastern European country.

Developing economy, speaking with a strong Slavic accent, recovering after a long dictatorship, you check many boxes :-p

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#117

Post by Tagbert »

asveikau wrote: post #97
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "t" in "Latin" is just a glottal stop for me. Using [t] sounds vaguely British to my ears. Same goes for other words that end in "t" + unstressed "en," e.g. "fatten," "batten."

That's a tad ironic because British people are some of the biggest users of glottal stops for /t/.

Received Pronunciation English does emphasize the /t/ in these cases, but other British dialects use glottal stops for /t/ in many cases.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#118

Post by paol »

arcticfox wrote: post #66
nwatson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine any two English accents as far apart from each other as are the Portuguese accents of "standard Globo TV presenter in Brazil" and that of the Azores. I grew up on and off in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Brasília) and later spent 20+ years in the SF Bay Area. Once in a while I'd run into old-school Azoreans who'd lived in the Portuguese towns (Santa Clara, Newark, San Leandro, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, C…

Is this a reasonable example of the Azores Portuguese?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVHjELjR9s Sounds like a Russian speaking Portuguese to me (American fluent in Brazilian Portuguese), pretty amusing but I can follow everything. I often think that when I hear PT-PT as well - interestingly someone in the comments says this sounds less Russian to them. I have very little exposure to non-Brazilian accents so no id…

> Is this a reasonable example of the Azores Portuguese?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVHjELjR9s

Yes, but every island has a different accent. That was filmed in S. Jorge and the accent there is quite mild. Some islands have stronger accents. Most notably S. Miguel, which in it's thickest form can be very hard to understand for mainland speakers.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#119

Post by rglullis »

ginja wrote: post #110
lucis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, this is for Portuguese, not Portuguese (PT) /s Recently, there was a polemic in social media that Portuguese mothers were worried their kids were only speaking "Brazilian", due to the dominance of Brazilian content creators in Youtube, Instagram, TikTok... [1]: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-... (Portuguese)

I'm Portuguese and I share this concern - PT-BR does have a lot of differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Pronunciation bothers us the least actually, but other things are weird and/or plain wrong for us: - Lots of weird words adapted from English like "time" (pronounced "tee-me") which means team in PT-BR. Portuguese has a fine word for that already - equipa ("equipe" in BR) - and most of us speak goo…

In a way I agree with your concerns but I'd say that the main issue is with some evolutionary aspect of the language. My guess is that we see it happening in Brazil more due to sheer population size.

Looking at your examples:

- Brazilians borrows words from other languages a lot more easily than the Portuguese, especially when the foreign word is shorter. No wonder "time" gets more usage than "equipe".

- "tu" is going to become extinct in Brazil within the next generation or two. People only use first- or third-person conjugation anyway. "Você" is going to be used for making the distinction between the actual subject of the sentence, and coloquially people just say "cê", which is just as short as "tu", so I don't see it surviving for long.

- Disagree on "Mas/mais". Yes, it is true that a lot of people make this mistake or (worse) don't even know the distinction, but this type of error is equivalent to English "they're/their/there": there is no redundancy or efficiency, so I don't see why the language would change here.

- "dou-lhe", "lhe dou": also going to be extinct due to the redundancy with propositions. You (and I) may not like the "caveman language", but it's undeniably more efficient to just throw verb + proposition + person than to deal with different pronouns.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#120

Post by ravishi »

forinti wrote: post #10

I'm a native Portuguese and Spanish speaker. The phonetics of Portuguese are much richer than Spanish, even though they are so similar in vocabulary. I think this is the reason you can speak Spanish so much faster (even if you are fluent in both). But I think the most difficult r is the Spanish r in perro. I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho. Personal anecdote: once my mother (who speaks Spani…

As a Brazilian learning Spanish, I definitely have a hard time saying perro. Perrito is way more difficult.
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