Posts

Popcorning!

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Some time ago Mrs EatRio and I were cooking up something delicious in the kitchen (prawn and lemon risotto since you ask). As I was getting the drinks I said “Would you mind spooning the risotto out into those those bowls?”

Her reply surprised me. Instead of the usual “Yes chef!” that I expect and demand in my kitchen, she asked incredulously “Spooning? I can spoon something out? I love how almost anything can be a verb in English.”

It wasn’t something I’d ever given much thought, but now that she had mentioned it I felt a warm glow of pride as if somehow I was responsible for the remarkable versatility of my native tongue. I excitedly blurted out “You can ladle out soup too! You know, using a ladle!” and waited expectantly for her amazed reaction to this new linguistic revelation, but instead she replied with a barely interested “Oh…” and I realised that the magic of the moment had passed…

More recently I stumbled upon something which shows that Portuguese can play that game too.

Popcorn

This is popcorn. In Portuguese it is pipoca. Image source

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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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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…

 

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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