Mixing Mangoes with Milk

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After hosting Rachel’s guest post just a few days ago, the karmic wheel of blog has come full circle and today I guest posted at Street Smart Brazil! I have to say I’m pretty excited – as far as I can recall it’s my first ever guest post! I’m sure many of you will already be familiar with SSB (like all best-buds, we’re on acronymic terms now), but if not, I’d love it if you’d pop over and say hello, check out my humble offering (which will explain the image below). I think it represents an absolutely fascinating insight into one small part of Brazilian history. Not a particularly nice part of Brazilian history to be fair, but interesting how something from so many years ago still survives today. Intrigued? I hope so!

The link to follow is here: http://streetsmartbrazil.com/blog/20121015/manga-and-milk

Mango and Milk is poisonous

Poisonous Mango?

The cat is on the roof

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Part of my job involves working with an application that is regularly updated by a team of programmers. Before each update is released to the (Brazilian) client, we check all the new features to make sure everything is working properly (sounds like fun right?).

Last week, when we were checking the new features, we found a little problem (it’s too boring to actually describe in detail), so I needed to speak with one of my Brazilian colleagues. When I asked  if he thought it was going to delay the next release, his reply was this: “Le me put it this way Tom – O gato subiu no telhado.”

o gatinho subiu no telhado

O gato subiu no telhado

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Peeling Pineapples and Wearing Watermelons

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I didn’t enjoy languages at school – in fact (to my later regret) I dropped French at the earliest opportunity. Since then I have come to realise that although I’m not particularly gifted in the learning department, I actually find language fascinating.

During my pre-Brazil travels around South America, I routinely met other travellers from around the world and I was delighted to discover that seemingly every nation has a different word for the noise a rooster makes in the morning. While British birds say “cock-a-doodle-DOO!”, their Brazilian counterparts say “Cocoricó”. I had a whole international list of rooster noises in my head at one point but I can’t remember them anymore (isn’t it annoying how you always forget the really important stuff?).

The linguistic fun continued when I got to Brazil and discovered that Brazilians have some hilarious turns of phrase. Someone who thinks they’re always right is the ‘owner of the truth’ (dona da verdade). Those glass fronted chicken rotisseries are known as Dog TV (Televisão de Cachorro – thanks Aki!).

Dog TV – not only for dogs…

 

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João and Maria Ninguém

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Today I’m going to pick up from where I left off in the last post with João Gilberto’s seminal album Chega de Saudade. One of the songs on the album is a light, lilting number titled Maria Ninguém (“ninguém” is Portuguese for nobody/no one). If you don’t know the song, here is a link (be warned, it can get stuck in your head for days…).

As you may recall, I was listening to this music back in London, meaning my usual Brazilian cultural encyclopedia (AKA Mrs Eat Rio) was not around. It was only when I got back to Brazil that I discovered that Maria Ninguém has a husband named João and that this couple are actually figures of speech!

 

Tito Na Rua Zé Ninguém Hoodrat

This is the work of Alberto Serrano, AKA Tito Na Rua. We’ll come back to this at the end…

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Word order can important be

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I’m no language expert (in fact I’m closer to the ‘Clueless’ end of the linguistic spectrum), but as far as I know, the Romance languages (such as Portuguese) tend to use a different word order to Germanic languages (such as English) when combining nouns and adjectives.

For example, in English we would say “the red car”, whereas in Portuguese they say “o carro vermelho“. In German: “das rote auto”; in French: “le voiture rouge“.

This may sound like the kind of thing that trips you up and leads to mistakes, but personally I found that I adjusted quite quickly to switching the word order. It probably helped that before Portuguese, I had spent some time learning Spanish, and during my school years (several æons ago) I occasionally attended French classes…

 

yoda

Sound like Yoda you will. Well, kinda… Apparently academic syntacticians have analysed Yoda’s speech and found what they describe as “object-subject-verb” word order. Nice way to justify your research grant guys… Source

 

However it isn’t only nouns and adjectives that change places. And depending on what you’re trying to say, sometimes it’s better to use the Germanic order!

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