Brazilian Portuguese Tom
He tossed the coin up and I called “Heads!” – he looked down and the expression that appeared on his face told me I’d lost. My friend and I were 18, travelling round New Zealand and had just decided which of us was going to make a rather awkward phone call.
One of us had to call up the bus company and arrange a spot on the bus that was coming through town the next day. The problem was that we were staying in a town called Whakapapa.
Whakapapa is in Tongariro National Park, New Zealand. Like much of New Zealand, it is spectacular.
“Er… so what? Just call up and tell them you’re in Whakapapa!” I expect you’re thinking. Well we had just read in our guide book that the Maori pronunciation of the letters “Wha” should sound like “Fu”. Seriously? One of us had to phone up a stranger and say all bright and breezy: “Hi there! Can I book two seats on the bus from Fuckapapa tomorrow?”.
Looking back I can’t think why we were so reluctant to make the call, but as slightly timid 18 year olds I guess neither of us felt very confident about this whole “Fuckapapa” thing (was that really the proper way to say it?). For the record, I made the call, I pronounced it “Fuckapapa” and the woman on the phone didn’t bat an eyelid!
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When you’re not familiar with a language, it can be tricky to get the pronunciation right. In Portuguese, my name (Tom) means ‘tone’ which seems quite appropriate because although it is spelt the same, it sounds very different to its English equivalent. I discovered this the hard way when I first got to Brazil.
Back in those early days I found that whenever I had to give my name (just my first name – like when entering a bar/club), people would look at me as if I had just told them I was called Flungelbert. A confused expression would appear, quickly followed by a “Huh?”.
I found this perplexing. “One of your most famous songwriter/composers was called Tom – how can you not know this name?” I thought.
“Tom Jobim. TOM Jobim. How do you people not know how to say his name?!” I thought to myself…
I soon came to understand that in Brazilian Portuguese, the final “m” in Tom is kind of swallowed. It’s hard to explain this in writing – it rhymes with the Brazilian word for bread, pão, which a friend of mine writes as “pown”.
As the months became years, I gradually found myself answering to this Brazilian form of the name. However, this advance has come at a price. Unfortunately for me, the Brazilian pronunciation of “Tom” sounds almost exactly like the word então (which means ‘so’ or ‘then’) and the average Brazilian says então approximately 50 times a day. Now I am constantly turning round thinking someone is trying to get my attention when in fact they’re just having a conversation with someone else. I’m considering changing my name to Pedro…
** Correction from some helpful readers: “Tom” and “Pão” don’t really rhyme (or at least they shouldn’t rhyme if you’re saying it properly!). That’s just how it sounds in my (slightly deranged) head… **
There is a marked difference in the way that Portuguese people and Brazilians speak Portuguese. Someone from Portugal clearly pronounces an “L” sound on the end of a word like “Brasil”. Here in Brazil, the final letter sounds more like a Californian schoolgirl’s expression of disgust “eeuw”: Braz-eeuw!
Gilberto Freyre, author of classic book analysing the formation of Brazilian society, Casa-Grande e Senzala.
According to Gilberto Freyre, legendary Brazilian sociologist, this change in the language was due to the influence of slaves brought across to Brazil from Africa. He put it rather poetically:
Com as palavras o mesmo que com a comida: machucou-as, tirou-lhes as espinhas, os ossos, as durezas, só deixando para a boca do menino branco as sílabas moles. Daí esse português de menino que no norte do Brasil, principalmente, é uma das falas mais doces deste mundo
My translation (usual caveats apply):
They did the same with their words as they did with their food: they broke them up, took out the bones, the hard bits, just leaving the soft syllables for the mouth of the white boy. Thus this boyish Portuguese, especially so in Northern Brazil, became one of the sweetest languages in the world.
Cheers to that Gilberto!
Great post, as usual. During my first visit to the US, long before I thought I would ever move here, someone asked me rather excitedly: “You’re from Brazil! Do you know Tom Jobim?” With Tom and Jobim pronounced the American way and the wrong stressed syllable in Jobim, I did not know who the guy was talking about. It was an awkward moment. He probably thought I was completely ignorant. But then he started singing one of Jobim’s songs and I was saved :)
Ha ha ha! “Do yer know Taaarrm JOE-bim?” ;)
I had a similar experience when I came to Brazil. A guy at a party asked me if I liked “Hugby” – I had no idea what he meant and he looked quite disappointed. I eventually worked out that he meant Rugby and then I disappointed him a second time by saying no! :D
kkk I just love these stories :)
Flungelbert! Ha ha… Someone at the dinner party on Wed was talking about Robert Redford…never in the 1000 yrs you’d think this name can be pronounced as Khoberchi Khegifokhgi..or something like that! :-)
I love your phonetic writing skills there Yulia! Khoberchi – Ha ha!
Every country I’ve been too struggles with Alice, not sure why, I just end up being called Alison or Alex while I’m there!
Loving the blog x
Ah, thanks Alice! :)
I think you’d be ‘Aleesey’ here in Brazil! I have a friend called Alec and all through his life (in England!) he has had to introduce himself as “AleCK” to stop people calling him Alex forever more! I always thought Tom was foolproof…
**EDIT** Sorry Alice – just realised you’re Winchester Alice! :) Guess you remember the Alec I’m talking about then…
I do. ha ha!
Southampton Alice now, but yeah! To be honest I’ve not been on holiday in so long I’m forgetting, but I have had some very odd ones. Next time I venture out the country I’ll try to note them down for you. But I even get Alison and Alex in England! Do you get Thomas?
I only get Thomas when someone is trying to tell me off. They assume that’s what my mum called me when I was young (she never has, not even once!).
Ditto with my name, but Alice isn’t short for anything. Think that’s why I occasionally get Alison (always peeps who are angry or annoyed). My mum hates anyone calling me Ali (so do I now). And then I get Alex. Fed up of saying wonderland x
Should of gone to depoll stuck with the nickname Wethead!
I think Flunglebert studied under Dr. Emile Schoephausen.
Tom,
Allow me to leave two links geared towards Brazilian music lovers. The first a brief article w/playlists for Brazilian psychedelic music of the sixties, and the second a blog that offers one of the albums mentioned in said article for download.
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/28/93283820/brazilian-psych-rock-for-a-night-on-the-porch
http://brnuggets.blogspot.com.br/2006/03/marconi-notaro-no-sub-reino-dos.html
By all means :) Looks good!
Felllow Tom checking in here. I would say it rhymes with “bom” much more than pão or então.
…Still, it’s funny how one of the most common and simple names in English can be such a struggle over here.
Yeah, I’m starting to regret highlighting what I guess must be my ‘bad ear’ for the sound of Portuguese! Or [desperately clutching at straw here] maybe it’s a Carioca accent thing…?
p.s. I thought your name was “Guy”! ;)
I met my friend, Rodrigo, where we worked many years ago. He always told us we mispronounced his name in English, but he would never tells us how it was supposed to be pronounced in Portuguese.
Fast forward 12 years and I went down to Rio for Carnival last year. I still called him by the name I always did. One time, a friend called him by his name using Portuguese. It sounded odd, but I thought it was a nickname she used for him. When I got back and started studying Portuguese for my trip back down there next year, I got to the part where words beginning with ‘R’ have an ‘H’ sound and I immediately remembered the way she had pronounced his name and it suddenly hit me with how you pronounce Rodrigo.
Ha ha! Cool story Stacey! :) I learned this lesson very quickly because one of my brother in laws is called Rafael and the other is called Rodrigo! I’ve always known them as ‘Haff-eye-el’ and ‘Hod-ree-go’ :D
I find my name endearing when spoken with an anglo accent, but I still prefer to be called by the shortened version, Ma. Turns out, it’s an impossible situation for my husband, as he feels like a inbred hick whenever he uses Ma. :)
By the way (and I mean it barely tangentially on topic), it took me a long time to grasp syllabication in English. I still think it’s crazy and does not follow any logical rules.
Ha ha ha! Ah, that made me laugh. I can imagine that calling your wife “Ma” would raise a few eyebrows in any English speaking country!! :D
Regarding the pronunciation of names, I was amazed the first time I heard a Brazilian say the name Ayrton Senna. My entire nation has always referred to him as ‘Airton’ – I need to tell the nation that it should actually sound more like ‘EYE-EAR-Tohn’!
You’re totally right about English. It wasn’t until I started learning Spanish and then later moved on to Portuguese that I realised that other languages have proper rules and systems. English might be simpler in terms of things like verb conjugation, but for every rule there are so many exceptions that I feel sorry for people who are learning it as a second language.
Yeah! So after years and years of thinking that there was no rules at all in English for open/closed vowels, I learn that yes there is! But there are many more exceptions to the rule than words that fall into the rule.
Mania and maniacal come to mind, and so do any words containing “ei” or “ey”. I just want to grab them by their figurative collars and say “find a sound and stick to it!!!”:)
On the same note, what’s the deal with melancholia and melancholy (linguistics make me sound like a cliched stand up comedian, by the way) ? It would make much more grammatical sense for them to be melancholy (noun) and melancholic (adjective). Grr!:)
Don’t even start me on English prepositions…
Oh, and to be fair with my husband, he actually tried to call me Ma, but I could see the pain on his eyes. I couldn’t do this with the poor thing.
Ha ha! At least he tried! :)
My wife is often amazed at my lack of solid understanding of my own language. Not that I make mistakes the whole time, but that I know things without really knowing why they’re right or wrong. I (and I suspect a lot of my fellow native English speakers) learn/understand English in an instinctive way. I never really stopped to try to make sense of it (and as you say, a lot of it doesn’t really make sense!). I wonder if this lack of a consistent logic in my native language helps explains why I’m so bad at learning new languages… (or am I just lazy? ;) ).
Hahhaha!
I don’t think you are lazy at all. I don’t think you would be living in Rio and adapting as well as you are if you were lazy :)
Ever since I moved to the US, my Portuguese has faulting me, too. I’ve been making crass errors that would make my poor mom cry (she was a journalist). By the way, do people back in England hear a tinge of Portuguese accent when you speak? Every time I go to Sao Paulo, my friends make found of my (apparently) heavier and heavier accent and I can’t notice it! :)
It’s funny how we take our own languages for granted. It fascinates me how sounds that are very natural for me can be hard for others. Take an “o” in Portuguese, for example. The dryness of it is something with what I’ve seen my husband struggling. Like “th” sounds in English, they were very hard for me to grasp (I still don’t think I do it very well), that simply roll out of my husbands mouth.
On of the things I really love about Portuguese, though, is the stream of conscience phrasing. What a Native English speaker would call a run in sentence. English phrasing is practical, intentional, precise and I love it, too. It takes you from point A to point F without detours. Portuguese exposes the meaningful connection making side relations between point A and point C, point E and point B, (sometimes even point D to point W, in a long parenthesis), before reaching point F.
Oh man, it’s not so much my accent, but the way I say things has been quite heavily influenced by speaking to so many non-native English speakers. Nowadays I often make mistakes in my sentence construction because I unconsciously copy the mistakes that I hear Brazilians making every day. Scary! ;)
I know exactly what you mean about going from point A-F. Like your mom, my wife is a journalist and we recently started working on translating some of her articles. That was a real eye-opener! Many of her Portuguese sentences needed to be split into 2, 3 or even 4 sentences in English! I found these long, meandering Portuguese sentences baffling – each sentence would say about 5 interconnected things. For me it seemed utterly chaotic, but from the other side of the coin, my wife felt the English sentences were overly short and matter-of-fact. I must be tricky to adapt your writing style.
Oh, yeah! :)
Constantly trying to remember that umido does not begin with an “H” has been an uphill battle. Not quite lost yet.
My job requires a lot of writing in both languages. Nothing big, but still, sometimes I struggle with a sentence for minutes. That combined with my hatred of proofreading has lead to some not very amused looks from my former boss. :)
You say your wife is amazed at your lack of understanding of your own language. I learned a lot about English when I taught it as a foreign language in Brazil. Like you, I instinctively used it correctly but without thinking about it. But sometimes a student would ask a question I couldn’t answer. One that comes to mind is the difference between many and much. I was stumped. But that night I made a list: many books, many people, many apples, much pleasure, much milk, etc. and suddenly, in an a-hah moment, I realized one is plural and the other singular. It seems so simple, yet I had never consciously thought about it.
Now it drives me crazy when people use less (which is singular) instead of fewer (which is plural.) After about three years of sending messages to a cheese company, I bought a package and noticed it had been corrected from “less fat, less calories” to “less fat, fewer calories.”
Now, if I could just learn the nuances of Portuguese. After not speaking it for 40 years, when I knew I was going back, I borrowed audio lessons from the library, but most were very elementary —common phrases for tourists. But I listened anyway to help me remember the sounds. I remembered or re-learned enough to get by and every day I was in Brazil, remembered more or copied phrases the Brazilians used, but I found myself spewing out any form of a verb that came to mind. I had spoken rather well 40 years earlier, so I hope I was using Portuguese verbs as instinctively and correctly as I do English, but probably not. I wonder if anyone understood me or if the Brazilians just nodded their heads politely to make me think they did. (Brazilians do aim to please, don’t they?)
I have found the same Carolina. I haven’t been teaching English, but I’ve found that while learning Portuguese I have had to think a lot more about language – how it works. It has been quite strange at times to learn a lesson in Portuguese and think it is quite strange, only to later realise that I have been using the same rule in English since I was 6! :D
I love language stories. I have some pretty good ones.
I learned early on that when I didn’t understand something I couldn’t say what I might say at home, “Huh?” because it sounds like Portuguese “rã.” Brazilians wonder why Americans go around saying “frog?” all the time.
On my first arrival in Rio we immediately headed someplace for breakfast. I decided I wanted eggs, so I ordered “duas uvas fritas.” The waiter looked a bit surprised and was obviously holding back a laugh. I thought it was my bad accent. After he left, a companion asked if I realized I had ordered two fried grapes. (Que vergonha!) When my breakfast arrived, I was happy to see two eggs (ovos) staring accusingly at me. The waiter had probably heard it before.
Later that day, my friend wanted to try the Brazilian soft drink we had heard so much about. She ordered Guanabara. For those not familiar with Rio or the language, Guanabara used to be the name of Rio State. She had meant to order Guarana. It would be like being in Denver and ordering a Colorado instead of a Coca Cola.
What a difference one letter can make: Another friend tells the story of being invited to a neighbor’s home for a meal. He was trying to show off some of the Portuguese idiomatic expressions he had learned. So when he was leaving, he told the family how much he enjoyed his meal and that he would love to spend time again with them to “bater papa.” He wanted to use the expression “bater papo” which is an idiom for “to chat.” Everyone looked at him in horror when he actually said that he’d like to “beat the Pope.”
Even signs can confuse one. In the parks I often saw signs that said. “Não Pise na Grama.” I knew “grama” was grass, so of course, I thought they said “Don’t Piss on the Grass.” A couple of months later, I realized they said “Don’t Walk on the Grass” —which sounds like it should have been obvious, but I just couldn’t get past the simiarily of pise and piss.
I often wonder how many stupid things I said or misunderstood in my 2 years in Brazil that I never realized.
Ha ha ha! Great stories Carolina! During our first carnival, Mrs Eat Rio actually dressed up in a green dress to which she had sewn dozens of (artificial) flowers and even some astroturf stuff! She then attached a sign which said “Não Pise na Grama” and I made the exact assumption you did! I thought “that’s just asking for trouble – some drunken guy will accept the challenge!” ;)
I wonder if the waiter toyed with the idea of serving up a couple of fried grapes… :D
I love it. I’m a New Zealander living in Brasil but never really thought much about the pronunciation of the ‘wha’ in Maori as it’s just part of how we speak in NZ. Anyway, now that you’ve mastered the ‘wha’ I thought you might like to attempt pronouncing New Zealand’s (and the world’s) longest place name (it’s also in Maori)
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu
Good luck.
Woah! I just spent 30 seconds working my way through that monster of a word! I’m sure I was nowhere near… ;)
p.s. when I was in NZ, I used to love listening to the weather forecast to hear the guy say Whangerai and Rotorua – such a cool sounding language!