kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Jul 22, 2023 13:26:24 GMT
A thread for anything Romance. Of course, it could be forked into individual language threads later if need be. I had something to add to a recent discussion on this forum, but it would have been too much of a digression, and I figured a Romance thread wasn't such a bad idea anyway. In my first year of Spanish I had some mental block with the verbs buscar and empezar. I have no idea why. They do not look in the least alike and mean completely different things, but I learnt them in the same lesson and could never remember which was which Incidentally, both buscar and empezar are what I call Iberianisms: very common verbs found in either Portuguese or Spanish, or both, that can't be found (at least not easily) in more distant Romance languages. I actually wrote something a few years ago on precisely that subject, where I presumptuously defined and cited a few of those iberismos. I added that those tended to have relatively flexible meanings and thus could be found in a whole host of contexts, and that while in some cases you could easily find a related word in other Romance languages, the discrepancies in terms of meaning and frequency of use legitimized a specific treatment. Here are some I could think of: entregar, llegar, permanecer, aguantar, esperar, alcanzar, aprovechar, pegar, sacar, subir, tomar, volver, agarrar, apagar, dejar, parar, caer, traer, encontrar, llevar, andar, coger I'm somewhat surprised I hadn't thought of "buscar" and "empezar" at the time. Well, in the case of the latter it's relatively understandable because I can't find the Portuguese equivalent. I wrote that thing in Spanish, hence the orthography; most of those words are spelled the same in both languages, but you have for instance chegar (instead of llegar), aproveitar or deixar in Portuguese. Also, while I'm mostly speaking of Portuguese and Spanish, what I mean is more like a general area of the Romance continuum. For instance, while most of those words can't be found in French or Italian in an obvious form, most of them exist in Occitan in pretty much the exact same form with the same meaning, which sometimes even had an influence on the French spoken in historically occitanophone areas (for instance, pegar can be found as péguer in southern French, albeit with only two of the acceptations of pegar, namely, "to glue" and "to be sticky"). |
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Jul 5, 2024 10:10:17 GMT
European Portuguese has one of the most complex phonologies of Romance languages in terms of the size of the phoneme inventory, but also due to the various sound changes that can occur, among which I especially like vowel alternation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_phonology#Nasal_diphthongsBack to the phoneme inventory, the nasal diphthongs are quite original too. The weirdest one for me is spelled <õe>, corresponding to /õj̃/ -- yes, even approximants can be nasalized, which in itself seems pretty rare to me. A more common nasal diphthong, and very common at that, is <ão> /ɐ̃w̃/. This one is particularly painful for French football commentators, because it often appears in names. In recent years, some commentators have started to try pronouncing it, but most of the time they still pronounce it as /aw/ or even /ao/. Take the name of the player Leão (the Portuguese word for "lion"): commentators usually say /leao/, when it should be the nice /ljɐ̃w̃/, which could be rather adequately approximated in French with /ljɛ̃w/. <ão> and <õe> actually alternate in many words, the former being used in the singular, and the latter in the plural: um leão, dois leões /ljõj̃ʃ/. Or um ladrão, dois ladrões "thief". But sometimes, a word in <-ão> will not have <-ões> in the plural, but rather <-ães>, with another nasal diphthong /ɐ̃j̃/. Take the word for "dog" for instance: um cão /kɐ̃w̃/, dois cães /kɐ̃j̃ʃ/. Or um pão, dois pães "(loaf of) bread". To make things worse, sometimes the vowel remains unchanged: uma mão, duas mãos /mɐ̃w̃ʃ/ "hand". Or um irmão, dois irmãos "brother". You might detect a pattern: words whose Latin accusative ends in -onem take -ões, -anem > -ães, -anum > -ãos ( irmão comes from germanum). It's one of the cases where knowing Latin can very directly help in learning a living Romance language; most learners have no choice but to just memorize which words take which plurals. That said, there are exceptions: for instance verão "summer" becomes verões even though it comes from * veranum but Wiktionary does list verão as a dated variant. I assume those cases stem from the relative uncommonness of either the word itself or its plural, which causes the speakers to give them the default -ões plural. |
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 11, 2024 23:36:54 GMT
Portuguese greetings can be rather redundant. The basic ones are bom dia "good day", used primarily in the morning, boa tarde "good afternoon", boa noite "good night", and olá "hello, hi", but they're very often used in conjunction, olá coming first followed by any of the other three phrases. It seems to me they form a single prosodic unit: most often, they're uttered in a steady pitch until the penultimate syllable, which has a rising intonation.
That's how many TV and radio hosts greet their audiences, or sales clerks their customers. To the best of my knowledge I would say it's semi-formal: you wouldn't say it to friends or family, nor to a judge or the president, but to someone anywhere in between might be okay. I could be wrong.
Also, something I've just realized today: the nasal diphthong /ũj̃/ is only found in one word (and its derivatives): the very common muito /ˈmũj̃.tu/ "(too) much, (too) many". Another oddity is that it may be the only word that has a nasal vowel that isn't signified in writing by a tilda or a following nasal consonant.
I find oddly cool to have a phoneme whose presence in the inventory is motivated by a single word! It would have been cooler if the main vowel of the diphthong were itself a phonemic "hapax" (/ũ/ is very common; notably that's how you pronounce the article um, which is also the number 1), or if the word it appeared in were more special e.g. the name of the language/country/citizens, but nothing's perfect.
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 17, 2024 11:45:16 GMT
An interesting problem coming from the fact that Portuguese is a gendered language: the way you say "thank you" in Portuguese is obrigado if you're a man, and obrigada if you're a woman: "(I am) (much) obliged (to you)". This is interesting in itself, because while it is de facto used as an interjection, one that happens to vary depending on the gender of the speaker, I would say it still has that personal connotation that the standard expressions meaning "thank you" in the other big Romance languages don't.
Something I had never really noticed before is that it can cause slightly weird inconsistencies. For instance Portuguese toll booths are usually equipped with automata speaking in a feminine voice, and so she ends up her messages with "obrigada". But a few meters after the booth you usually have a written sign thanking you for your visit, and it uses "obrigado". As often in Romance languages, the masculine grammatical gender kinda doubles up as neuter so it's not surprising, but it's weird to see the company running the highway seemingly swap genders that way.
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Aug 17, 2024 12:29:34 GMT
Wouldn't it seem weirder if the woman used the masculine form? It makes sense to me that a voice that is obviously female would use the feminine form of the word, while a written sign has no gender, so uses the default, which is the masculine.
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 17, 2024 13:01:20 GMT
Wouldn't it seem weirder if the woman used the masculine form? It would to me, but something caught my attention in the usage notes of "obrigado" on Wiktionary: "Other speakers make no distinction between obrigado and obrigada and use the interjections interchangeably." Now, it doesn't specify whether that applies to Brazilian or European Portuguese. My default assumption when reading something about Portuguese on the web is that it refers to BP, since it's the most widely spoken variety of Portuguese, and the one a randomly picked Anglophone on the web (so with high chances of being an American) would be most likely to refer to. In any case, I don't think I've ever heard a man use "obrigada" or a woman use "obrigado" here, but I can see how the latter could occur without it sounding completely off, while the former definitely would. |
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 17, 2024 21:28:13 GMT
Something I had never really noticed before is that it can cause slightly weird inconsistencies. For instance Portuguese toll booths are usually equipped with automata speaking in a feminine voice, and so she ends up her messages with "obrigada". But a few meters after the booth you usually have a written sign thanking you for your visit, and it uses "obrigado". As often in Romance languages, the masculine grammatical gender kinda doubles up as neuter so it's not surprising, but it's weird to see the company running the highway seemingly swap genders that way. So you feel that the message on the sign should be (presented as if it were) from the (female) automaton? I don't think I would see things that way. Come to think of it, maybe I'd like the word on the sign to be (masculine) plural (as if coming from all the people in charge there). Would that feel unnatural to a Portuguese-speaking mind? |
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Aug 17, 2024 21:33:35 GMT
That sounds odd to me, because it would imply that the message is coming from...well, I'm not sure. I was going to say the people manning the tollbooth, but presumably it's all automated, so there aren't any. So it would have to refer to some shadowy Powers That Be, whom I imagine as ghostlike figures in the background. Personally, I'd rather not have any messages from them.
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 18, 2024 0:36:53 GMT
So you feel that the message on the sign should be (presented as if it were) from the (female) automaton? Not really. An impersonal sign reading "obrigada" would definitely seem weird. But I still would like it better if the genders matched! Come to think of it, maybe I'd like the word on the sign to be (masculine) plural (as if coming from all the people in charge there). Would that feel unnatural to a Portuguese-speaking mind? The thing is, while I'm pretty sure it's possible, I don't remember having ever heard "obrigados/as". I've just checked Wiktionary and here's what it says: "(rare, used by a group of males, or males and females) thanks; thank you" So it would have to refer to some shadowy Powers That Be, whom I imagine as ghostlike figures in the background. To me it would definitely be the company taken as a collective of individuals, but yeah I can definitely see the ghostlike figures. |
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 18, 2024 0:42:19 GMT
And yes, it's mostly automated booths. In fact it seems like I've always known them automated, back when most French tollbooths were still manned.
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 26, 2024 21:38:55 GMT
Spanish haber muerto "to have died" reminds me too much of the jocular/childish French avoir mouru for me to take it seriously. It's something I've noticed with Spanish: constructions that in the other Romance languages I'm familiar with would be considered faulty are standard in Spanish. Even when there's no direct equivalent in the others, sometimes you can still see (or at least I can imagine) its faulty roots.
Mistakes becoming the norm is one of the basic ways languages change over time, and I'm not saying Spanish is special in that regard, but I don't know, it's like Spanish yields easily to the temptation of natural enough mistakes, when its siblings at least try to put up a fight. Another example that comes to mind is quiénes/quienes, the plurals of the interrogative and relative pronouns respectively. Can you imagines writing quis in French?
Yet another one that comes to mind: a mi amigo le gusta mucho "my friend likes it (very) much/it pleases my friend (very) much": it's "proper" Spanish fit for say, news articles, but this "a + object + object pronoun" construction would be at best colloquial French, bordering on the faulty or at least unnecessarily redundant.
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 26, 2024 22:22:19 GMT
I share your feeling about haber muerto. The other two constructions you mentioned don't really bother me. I guess quiénes/quienes is a little annoying when you think of its etymology (a plural ending stuck onto an accusative singular ending...) but on the other hand, having a plural version of "who" is logical enough, and what else could they have come up with based on the current language (i.e. without fishing back something from Latin)?
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 26, 2024 22:41:22 GMT
But maybe quiénes/quienes, instead of being coined from scratch to fill a gap, actually coexisted with a more normal plural at some point long ago and won out? If so, I'd definitely have preferred the normal form to remain. I don't know the history of the word.
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Aug 27, 2024 4:09:52 GMT
I guess quiénes/quienes is a little annoying when you think of its etymology (a plural ending stuck onto an accusative singular ending...) Ha! Actually I wasn't sure which view I found more annoying: quem+ s or more synchronically, an inflection of an invariable pronoun. I don't know the history of the word either, but it looks like a "recent" (as in a few centuries maybe but not a millenium old) innovation, if only because it doesn't exist in Portuguese. on the other hand, having a plural version of "who" is logical enough, and what else could they have come up with based on the current language (i.e. without fishing back something from Latin)? I agree. Like I said, it was a natural enough evolution. |
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 31, 2024 23:28:18 GMT
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In my first year of Spanish I had some mental block with the verbs buscar and empezar. I have no idea why. They do not look in the least alike and mean completely different things, but I learnt them in the same lesson and could never remember which was whichIncidentally, both buscar and empezar are what I call Iberianisms: very common verbs found in either Portuguese or Spanish, or both, that can't be found (at least not easily) in more distant Romance languages.
