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The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

hackingportuguese.com

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Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#121

Post by mprovost »

lucis wrote: post #32
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.

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)

When Sesame Street was first popular in the 1970s my great aunt in Massachusetts famously forbade her grandchildren from watching it because she didn't want them to learn how to speak like New Yorkers.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#122

Post by selimthegrim »

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…

>I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho.

Do Argentines do this too or is that with just ll?

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#123

Post by mprovost »

darkwater wrote: post #52
diego_moita wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#124

Post by lhorie »

rglullis wrote: post #114
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 pro…

> The art and the stories come first

Yes, this can't be emphasized enough. I mentioned inclusivity to weave a narrative, and although one could argue that more recent characters like Luca are more of the checkbox-ticking variety, generally speaking the character cast of Monica's cartoons is mind-bogglingly diverse, far beyond "wokeness" lines. There's Chico Bento (a hillbilly boy living in a farm) and his gang, there's Papa-capim (a Guarani boy living in the rainforest) and his gang, there's Piteco (a pre-historic man) and his friends, Bidu (a blue dog) and friends, Penadinho (a ghost) and friends, Austronauta (a spaceman), Rolo/Tina (young adults), Capitao Feio (an anti-hero), Horacio (a vegetarian t-rex), Louco (a literally insane guy) and the list goes on.

In a single edition, you could go from one story about a dog talking to a rock (yes, the rock is a recurring character), to another about the grim reaper bringing people to the afterlife (yes, she's a recurring character too), to one about Magali's gluttony vs Dudu's aversion to food. There's so much going on in the cartoon's universe that it's hard to do it justice with just a short comment on HN.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#125

Post by School-Cotton »

asveikau wrote: post #100
School-Cotton wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the /t/ in Latin is a glottal stop. Where are you from? > Pronouncing it as [t] isn't often outside the acceptable range, or something that makes you sound too foreign. I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure someone pronouncing the /t/ in "butter", "little", etc. as [t] would make me very confident that they weren't American.

> Where are you from? I was born in Washington DC to a family that had recent roots all over Europe. And had some young interest and exposure to Spanish. I'm American, but my accent is a little all over the place. I don't get much grief over this in the northeast, but on the west coast people are pretty confused by the way I talk.

I’m from Arizona (not the West Coast, but culturally and physically close enough).

My mom would always try to correct my pronunciation of “Latin”, “mountain”, and similar words with a /t/ realized as a glottal stop.

She’s from the East Coast, so indeed, maybe that pronunciation isn’t as common there.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#126

Post by ilamont »

bigodbiel wrote: post #15
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…

This really reminds me of “tranatlantic accent” which prevailed in the mid 1900 and for many non-English speakers was considered as the de facto English, mainly because of it popularization via news and entertainment industries. Just like Hollywood and news broadcast, Brazilian soap operas have created the de facto Portuguese accent for non-Portuguese speakers.

I knew it as "mid-Atlantic" ... you sometimes hear it in old black and white Hollywood movies featuring upper crust East Coast Americans and media personalities like William F. Buckley. I believe FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt used it as well.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#127

Post by ilamont »

andrepd wrote: post #11
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…

"BBC english" is also the name given to the rp "neutral" accent of British English.

RP = "Received Pronunciation"

Mentioning this because the term is not widely known in the U.S., at least in my circles.

https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/rece...

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#129

Post by EL_Loco »

andrepd wrote: post #111
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.

Portuguese ranks sixths on number of native speakers, according to Wikipedia.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#130

Post by EL_Loco »

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…

Quirky anectode: I befriended an american hobo who travelled to Brazil in the 90's (he came here again every now and then). He didn't shower much, truly looked like a crusty vagabond, and when he found out about it, he absolutely loved the character named Capitão Feio ("Captain Ugly"), a dirty, crusty supervillain whose superpowers are spreading dirt around. Capitão Feio lives in the sewers and got his powers and he got crushed by all the dust and dirt of his huge, old comic book collection. He's also Cascão's uncle, and his goal is to become dirtier than his nephew.

edit: I don't know what he's actually called in english. Captain Ugly is the literal translation. By the way, 'Little Onion' is way cooler than 'Jimmy Five'.

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