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The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

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Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#101

Post by chefandy »

ratww wrote: post #75
pelasaco wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes in Portugal, I tend to see a lot of similarities with German by the spoken Portuguese.. Like "Ei" sounding like "Ai" and "P" sounding like "B" in the beginning of sentences.

I was really surprised at how close the alphabet letters are pronounced in German and Portuguese.

Though I don't speak Portuguese myself, my immediate family roots are Azorean and grew up among the huge Azorean population surrounding New Bedford and Fall River, so I've heard it regularly for my entire life. I lived a bit further north during High School and regularly encountered folks from Russia and the Ukraine. I thought I was crazy for thinking spoken pt-PT and Russian sounded similar from a distance. However, my best friend who grew up in St. Petersburg and has a degree in linguistics said he often does a double-take when hearing pt-PT speakers on the street! He had some sort of technical explanation for it (that didn't stick in my head being a non-linguist and (sadly) monolingual.)

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#102

Post by FeteCommuniste »

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/.

Definitely. I was thinking more of the sort you hear from BBC reporters.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#103

Post by SwiftyBug »

lucis wrote: post #36
lvass wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Brad Pit" becomes "brahdjee pitchee" I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. It's a common pattern in a large amount of english words, I think most or all of us can pronounce it correctly, but we don't because it'd be harder say and recognize while trying to pronounce it like an american almost sounds like pedantry here.

> I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. You mean about the "mispronunciation"? Because the j in "bradhjee" I hear mostly in southeastern accents, where people in Northeast says it more closely with how it's spoken in English.

I believe the standardization refers to adding the vowels to the end of thos consonant-ended words. I believe most northeasterners would say "brédi píti".

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#104

Post by asveikau »

School-Cotton wrote: post #82
SamBam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeating "butter" is actually a great way to teach people how to make the rolled R [r].

By "rolled r", do you mean the trill? The trill and flap are different sounds in some languages (for example, Spanish "perro" (dog) has the trill whereas "pero" (but) has the flap). The /t/ in Am.E. "butter" is the flap.

If you start with a flap and add a little air and lengthen it, you get into trill territory. This is a good way to teach the trill.

Once I recall I pronounced a drawn out /d/ when cold and startled, and a friend commented that I "rolled my D" and it was weird.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#105

Post by tasha0663 »

rogerallen wrote: post #69

LOL, I really expected to read an article about a variant of the statistics programming language R...

I often entertain the notion that SQL would be way more enjoyable in Spanish.

See also Fjölnir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_lang..., where the program usually seems to end with "GRUNNUR". My understanding is that this is basically just the name of a standard library package "ground", but screaming GRUNNUR at the end of a program feels like something out of an issue of Heavy Metal.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#106

Post by SwiftyBug »

ratww wrote: post #68
diego_moita wrote: post #19

Scottish people can pronounce the same sound! When you say "Loch Ness" with a very thick Scottish accent, the "ch" in loch is quite close to it. Also the sound is quite common in other languages: "roi" in French, "reisen" in German, ... Even some Spanish dialects like Galego have the same r. Only Castilian/normal Spanish doesn't have it. OTOH, just ask a Brazilian to pronounce simply "the". The "th" phoneme is quite…

That's so true! The thing with "th" I see is that we Brazilians speak it as "fink" (fɪŋk) or "sink" (sɪŋk) rather than the traditional "θɪŋk". But I find that's mostly a pedagogical problem, with teachers also doing it and students copying. However after quick explanation and practice, most can learn (I think I did :).

I think that phoneme sounds and looks silly. The whole putting the tongue out in order to properly pronounce "th" is very weird for Portuguese speakers. Like in this scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where Claude Frollo says: "The sentence: death!":

https://i.imgur.com/lBEU5Zk.png

It's very funny to watch this in Portuguese because the word he uses is "morte", and he looks very stupid putting the tongue out after saying "morte".

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#107

Post by nwatson »

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…

That sounds quite like the Azorean Portuguese I'd hear in the SF Bay Area, except I think modern Azoreans in the Azores probably have been exposed to a lot of Brazilian TV and music and so have probably "normalized" a bit toward the "centroid" of a pan-luso pronunciation. The SF Bay Area Azoreans I'd hear probably stuck to an "older original accent" and so were probably further from the Brazilian Portuguese I grew up with.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#108

Post by cesarb »

samueloph wrote: post #29
wefarrell wrote: post #23

I can never get over the way my Brazilian wife pronounces the currency. Singular - hey-ow Plural - hey-I. They're spelled real and reals respectively.

The correct spelling for the plural form is 'reais' (the 'l' from the singular form 'real' becomes an 'i'). I think I've never heard anybody pronounce 'reais' without the sound of s at the end, are you sure she doesn't say it? It's probably something like hey-eyes (hey-eye-shh for cariocas)

A small historical note: there are/were two different Brazilian currencies called Real. The current one has "reais" as the plural, but the old one had "réis" as its plural form.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#109

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

paol wrote: post #51
forinti wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is certainly a factor. But in my personal experience one of the biggest hurdles for Brazilians is the fact that Portuguese have a much shorter vowel pronunciation, so the separation between syllables is much less pronounced. In contrast, some Brazilian accents have comically long vowels, so it sounds like they are spelling out every word.

Re: The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

#110

Post by ginja »

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)

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 good English so "time" is beyond weird for us.

- Wrong verb conjugations are used in informal conversation, e.g. "tu vai à praia?" (correct would be "tu vais à praia?" and generally we'd omit "tu" [you] because it adds no useful information)

- Many Brazilians seemingly think "mas" (but) and "mais" (more) are the same word because they pronounce it similarly and thus end up using "mais" for everything, even in writing

- Different usage of pronouns, e.g. "eu dou-lhe" in PT vs "eu lhe dou" in BR (or worse, "eu dou a você" - sounds like caveman language plus "você" is considered rude in PT)

Vocabulary differences make for some really funny misunderstandings sometimes though. My Brazilian neighbor's kid was really confused and scared when she was told she needed to "levar uma pica" (get a shot, as in an injection/vaccine) - in Brazil this same sentence means "take a dick". I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time.

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