2 Comments on “10 Portuguese Colloquial Contractions”

1. Very nice list.

   I think that in some of these examples what is happening is similar to French usage of putting a tag in front of the expression, such as qu’est-ce que. Qu’est-ce qu’il est dinge. Qu’est-ce qu’elle a fait apres?, versus Qu’a fait-elle apres?

   For example, in Brazil, o que e que aconteceu? may come out sounding like que que aconteceu since the o and the e are not stressed. The second “que” means “that”, not “what”. One of your examples might be rendered with the English sounds of “key, key foy,” in speech but when written as “o que e que foi? (with the accents). The “o” and the “e” are unstressed.

   If I had to pick the one most useful and distinguishing word in Brazilian Portuguese, it might be “e” with the accent, meaning “is.” A Brazilian might listen to a long discourse from someone and at the end of a five minute ramble, simply reply by saying “e”. “E” often takes the place of “sim” or can replace the original verb. “Estao todos eles chegando tarde outra vez? could be answered with Estao sim, but just as easily with “e”, meaning that’s the way that things are, that’s what the situation is. English, French and Spanish all require at least two words here when using “to be”, “is”, “est” and “es” don’t carry the weight to stand alone: “It’s true,”c’est vrai, asi es.

   Brazilian Portuguese often resembles a pidgin or creole in that so much syntactical variation is allowed but I believe the changes in verb endings that you listed are considered sub-standard.

   I agree about swallowing or not using reflexives but I have had Brazilians tell me adamantly that they do not do that and that it is incorrect to do so.

   In my experience, spoken Spanish, even by peasants, tends to adhere much more to the written standards than does even normal register Brazilian Portuguese. Given this, students of Portuguese need to decide what constructions are more like the phrase, “It’s me” in English, which is perfectly proper spoken English, and which expressions are more like “Me and John went to the store.”

   So, what is the status of the phrase, ” Como voce vai? Eu te vi na praia”? I used “te” in place of “o” and “voce” all the time as do most cariocas. Eu vi ela probably also passes muster.

   How about ela viu eu? Probably not. How about “Tu vai amanha? Probably not although this construction is basically the same as the “eu te vi” example.

   How about “Fi-lo porque qu-lo” instead of “eu o fiz porque eu o quis” or Fiz porque quis? Spanish grammar, even for the relatively uneducated lacks this flexibility in case forms.

   Speaking of contractions:

   In my experience in Brazil, the “of” plus indefinite article contractions aren’t used very much . I believe that this is because of the palatalization of the word “de”. If they are used, what comes out sounds like “juma” rather than duma. Brazilians prefer to palatalize when possible so if the contraction is written as “duma” the spelling doesn’t correlate with the pronunciation except in the South.

   With respect to final unstressed “r”s, I believe that they are often aspirated but this may be quibbling. The sound can be identical to the various sounds of “r” in English, French and Spanish, depending upon the speaker and region. In Rio, however, they often sound like the phonetic sign (x). In general, for Americans, just pronounce “r”s like American “h”s and you will be fine, especially in Rio. Aspirated h is an easier sound that trilled or gutteral r’s for most English speakers.

   Para is contracted as shown above but this really isn’t a big deal. This is just how it sounds in normal speech and is not a sound change as with the “por” or the “em” contractions and no one objects to writing “para o Brasil. The “de” contractions with ele and ela and the direct objects are significant because they completely change the normal Brazilian pronunciation of “de”, providing a hard “d” sound. Otherwise de plus ele would be pronounced like the word jelly in English.

   The term “o senhor” and its variants are seldom used in Brazil. I worked in a corporation and I don’t believe that I ever heard this term used. Some families may used it like some Americans use “yes, sir.”

   Using “num” for “nao” is something that I don’t recall encountering in Rio or Sao Paulo. What I do recall is that “nem” replaces “nao” at times and especially in situations where Spanish would use the word “no.” For example, Todos os Americanos sao ricos. Nem sempre.

   However, “num”, “nao” and “nem” are all nasalized and there might be variation in the the pronunciation of the nasal depending on what follows. It is an interesting observation.

   I find the word “obrigado” to be interesting because it seems to be cognate for the older word for thank you found in the hills and American South. Andy Griffith usually says “much obliged.”

   One thing that I might point out is that the word or letter represented by “o” is very often swallowed. I find to my mind that saying “brigado” corresponds to how I would pronounce the word except in careful speech.

   This is such a good article that I felt it merited more discussion. These are only my observations and I might be wrong about some of them. For those of us equally good in Spanish, I think that we prefer speaking Brazilian Portuguese. The sounds are more interesting and for some reason, there are many constructions common to English and Brazilian Portuguese absent in the other Romance languages.

   For example, in Portuguese the personal infinitive can be used almost identically to avoid subjunctives as in English. Brazilian Portuguese lacks personal “a” and is moving towards using subject pronouns for object pronouns, which is much easier for English speakers. Instead of “a ella, la vi yo”, Brazilians say Eu vi ela, which simplification outdoes even English, where the distinction between she and her is still made. This makes word order in Brazilian Portuguese easier for English speakers. Where Spanish omits subject pronounces, Portuguese like English usually uses them.

   Brazilian Portuguese, like American English prefers the preterite to the passe-compose type construction found in French, Penninsular Spanish and Italian. The dar plus para constructions are far easier than in Spanish and French, which require learning complicated word orders and can involve phoneme changes. “Se la di la manzana” means what in Spanish? Eu di a maca para ela is very close to how it can be done in English, without word order changes or ambiguous pronouns. Minor things like telling time are easier in Portuguese since there is no word change (always horas, always time) in Portuguese and English.

   Even more so than in English, Brazilian Portuguese falado finds itself ofen being as pithy as possible. To answer the question, “I went there?”, One might answer by simply saying “e” (accent) or Fui. Spanish is similar but usually requires “si”, but in French and Italian the word “there” requires a pronoun as does the word for “some” and direct objects require grammatical agreement reflected in the past participle. Yikes. “Je ne l’ai jamais aimee.”

   The number one thing that makes Portuguese easier? There is no frigging 2nd person formal term. No matter how much I study the rules in Spanish, there is no there there. I often watch films in Spanish with subtitles and the sound track will quite often diverge by saying Usted while the subtitles say tu or vice versa. Watch Narcos in Spanish and the Columbian speakers will use Usted and tu for the same person in the same sentence, or usually vos as the case may be. A prominent character playing a mother only uses Usted with her daughter. Many places in Latin America use all three, tu, vos and Usted. Spain maintains vosotros and Ustedes.

   French maintains the polite distinction more uniformly than Spanish, except in Quebec where vous is not used as often. I find myself wasting brain cells trying to process these distinctions in French, Spanish, Italian and German, while in Brazil and the English speaking world, we are egalitarians. Like the Quakers in the past, it may be time for English speakers learning foreign languages to refuse to use the formal forms.

   I hope that some of this is of interest. Often when I see an excellent article without comments, I feel the need to provide feedback as a way of recognizing and thanking the writer. Well done and peace.

   Reply

2. Fantastically-informative article!! Almost every vital point regarding the actual current pronunciation is to be found here, and almost NONE of them are listed/printed ANYWHERE, neither in books nor videos / blogs etc.

   For the record, I hear ‘num’ for ‘não’ [preceding the verb] all the time in Brazil.

   Reply