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Grandparents
Dads side
grandfather- dominant in Spanish but can speak English well
grandmother- monolingual Spanish

Moms side
grandfather- monolingual Spanish
grandmother- monolingual Spanish

Parents
Mom- Dominant Spanish but also fluent in English.
Dad-Dominant Spanish but also fluent in English.

Siblings
Brother- Bilingual Spanish and English on the same level.
Sister- Dominant English but also fluent in Spanish
Me- Bilingual Spanish and English on the same level.

Notes-

Mother, Father and siblings are the only people who currently live outside of Mexico.

Grandparents on my fathers side lived in New York for a little but my grandmother never bothered to learn.

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Este video fala de muitas diferentes formas de saludar a uma pessoa. Eu gostei muito porque a mulher dá exemplos específicos do contexto em que cada frase seria usada y também que formas seriam mais comuns na vida real.

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10 Ways to Say Hello in Brazilian Portuguese

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Este vídeo foi muito interessante porque diz como dizer palavras ofensivas no português do portugal. Eu achei que foi interessante porque é um bom exemplo de como o português de portugal e muito diferente que o português do brasil e também ensina um pouco da atitude que tem os portugueses de o português brasileiro.

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HOW TO SWEAR IN PORTUGUESE! More Parodies In Description :D ►How To Swear In Portuguese 2: https://youtu.be/Q_rRsXtk8ig ►Subscribe for more CRAZY content : http://bit.ly/1jym6Ic Portuguese Parodies: ►How To Swear In Portuguese 2: https://youtu.be/Q_rRsXtk8ig ►Why Do I Talk In English : https://youtu.be/mSmPxJxIV-M ►O Youtuber Portugues : https://youtu.be/6mXChV8XcPw ►10 Desculpas Esfarrapadas : https://youtu.be/AxIHRR_ZJp0 ►50 Facts About Me : https://youtu.be/7Wo8F_B0Qt4 Social Networks: ►Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Vycemor ►Twitter : https://twitter.com/Vycemor ► Instagram : http://instagram.com/vycemor ►Tumblr : http://vycemor.tumblr.com/ ► Vines : http://bit.ly/1NH17PR ► Donate : http://bit.ly/1UZfQdc Outro Song created by "NoCopiryghtSounds".

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Eu gostei deste artigo porque fala geralmente de as influências que diferentes línguas tiveram no português brasileiro. Fala da colonização e a influência dos escravos africanos que resultou em as variedades de português que existem no brasil hoje.

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Just like Spanish, Italian and French, Portuguese is also a Latin derived language. Most of Brazilians are not aware about the history of their language and its relation to the many others languages that were spoken in the country, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese Pedro Alvares Cabral; as well as the other languages that were spoken before and after Brazil's colonization.

Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, the seventh most spoken language in the world, and the third with most speakers in Europe. According to some historians, when Brazil was found by the Portuguese, there were more than a thousand different languages in the country being spoken by Indians of different ethnic groups.

A little bit of brazilian history

Portuguese colonization started gradually along the coastline in 1532 when the "capitanias" (the Administrative division and hereditary fief of the Portuguese state in some of its colonies) were institutionalized. During this period, many communities of the "Tupi" and "Guarani" Indians could be found on the seaside, from Rio de Janeiro in the south through Pará in the north. To establish a communication with the natives, the Portuguese started to learn the language and dialects used by the Indians. From the Tubinambá, spoken by the groups more open minded to the contact with the colonizers, a common language was created to be used by Indians and Europeans.

In 1595 Father José de Anchieta registered that this was the most spoken language on the Brazilian Coast. This general language derived from Tupinambá, which was the first influence of the Portuguese language in Brazil.

The Africans, who were brought as slaves to the country when the Sugar-cane cultivation began, were in the Capitanias of São Vicente (currently the state of São Paulo), Bahia and Pernambuco. At the beginning of the colonization, Portuguese was a gradual influence in Brazil. An intensification could already be felt in the century XVII. The slaves obviously ended up learning the Portuguese to communicate with their Lords and also learned the general Indian created language - the most talked among the settlers.

According to a text written by the Father Antonio Vieira in 1694, the language spoken by the Portuguese families living in São Paulo was an Indian language. The children of these families learned how to speak Portuguese at school. Only in the second half of the eighteenth century Portuguese becomes the most spoken language. The reason for this was the exploration of the countryside by the "bandeirantes", and the discovery of the diamond and gold mines, and the consequent raising of the Portuguese immigration. In August 17 of 1758, Portuguese became the official Brazilian language by an act signed by the Marquês de Pombal that also banned the use of the general language.

A mix of cultures

At this stage, Portuguese had already progressed as all languages naturally change through time. It's good to point out that when Pombal signed the decree, the Brazilian Portuguese speakers had already incorporated many Indians and African words derived from Indian languages in their vocabulary, like the name of plants, fruits and animals that have their origins in the Tupinambá. There's many examples to be told like caatinga, caju, capim, capivara, carnaúba, cipó, cupim, curió, ipê, jaboticaba, jacarandá, mandacaru, mandioca (cassava), maracujá (passion flower), piranha, tatu (armadillo) and the famous abacaxi (pineapple).

Among the indigenous words that were incorporated to the Brazilian Portuguese are: Aracajú, Avaí, Guanabara, Guaporé, Jabaquara, Jacarepaguá, Jundiaí, Parati, Piracicaba, Tijuca (all names of cities or neighborhoods). It's interesting to notice that the Indigenous influence helped to create a lot of slang and idiomatic expressions that are still in use (things like "andar na pindaíba" that means something close to "being penniless"). The Africans form "Bantu" and "Yoruba" groups left a legacy of their own in the culture of the samba and bossa-nova country. The Afro-Brazilian culinary has the quindim, the abará, the acarajé and the vatapá. The candomblé (Afro religion) has the orixás yemanjá, oxum, Iansã, and so on.

The Quimbundo (spoke in Angola) gave its contribution to the Brazilian Portuguese with some words such as caçula (the youngest son), cafuné e moleque (or brat). Words used to express the way of life and the dance of the slaves such as senzala, maxixe, ginga and even samba, were also incorporated to the vocabulary. After the Brazilian Independence (in 1822), the traffic of slaves decreased until it completely stopped in the year 1850. From then on, many Europeans immigrants, mostly Germans and Italians, arrived in the country.

our language in literature

This contact of the Brazilian Portuguese with other languages was one of the most important coefficients in generating the many language regionalisms that can be found in the country nowadays. As an example we can say that the Northeast Portuguese was heavily influenced by the Indian and the Africans, especially in the States of Pernambuco and Bahia. At the same time, the Portuguese spoke in the south by its way was influenced by the European immigrants like German and Italians, especially in the states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul.

In the second half of the 19th century, the authors from the Romanticism tried to reflect on their works a "Brasilidade" (way or "art form" to be Brazilian) that distinguished the country from its former colony. This also happened at the beginning of the 20th Century with the modernists.

A good example for the first case can be found in the books by José de Alencar that used the exaltation of the Indian figure, bringing to literature the Brazilian way of talking. For the second case let's remember Mário de Andrade, one of the most famous modernists that later on would go back to the romantic idea of rescuing of the origins and the construction of a self identity.

" The Portuguese language allows its speakers to understand 85% of the Spanish, 45% of the Italian and 15% of the French languages.

" The Portuguese language is considered a very important language especially when one realizes that around the year 2015, Brazil will be the third or fourth biggest market of the world.

" The Portuguese is one of the languages in the political and economical dialogues in Europe, South America, Africa and the East Timor.

" The Portuguese is a language of the future and of global communication that will offer big opportunities of work and social interaction around the globe.

Throughout the years the Brazilian has adopted expressions not only from the indigenous and African languages but also from the Spanish, French, Italian and, more recently, the English such as the cases of words like, "gym" and "happy hour" among others. Another interesting fact is when you see Brazilians who have been living for many years in the U.S adapting verbs like "to park" to the Portuguese saying neologisms like "parkear" from the verb - to park, or phrase like "vai rolar um party a noite" (there's going be a party tonight with the English word taking the part of the Portuguese: Festa).

Regarding the Portuguese spoken in Portugal, we can say that the vocabulary is almost the same, but phonetically, differences are perceptible. We also recommend you to read Why Portuguese is the Language of Future Communication, as the language offers great possibilities to more jobs, business and social interaction associated with the globalized world.

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Just like Spanish, Italian and French, Portuguese is also a Latin derived language. Most of Brazilians are not aware about the history of their language and its relation to the many others languages that were spoken in the country

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Eu gostei muito deste artigo porque fala em detalhe da história do português vernacular no brasil. Fala da influencia da influencia das linguas africanas em BVP e como differentes regiones tiverom diferentes creoles dependendo da lingua dos escravos e as infuencias de outros paises.

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Eu gostei muito desta pagina do internet porque fala da influência africana em a língua portuguesa. O autor da uma boa explicação da história Africana no brasil. Falando de como as circunstâncias de os Africanos no Brasil influenciaram a língua portuguesa no brasil.

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Esta página do internet foi muito interessante para mim, porque fala sobre a diversidade e variedade que existe no português brasileiro. O autor da uma lista dos diferentes dialetos que existem, separadas por região, e explica a razão que cada dialeto e distinto.

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When Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, does dialect variation across its vast territories make the local language easier or harder to learn? Do regional differences present language barriers to non-native speakers with only a basic understanding of Portuguese?
Brazil stretches over 3.28 million square miles. If you tried to fit Portugal inside of Brazil, there'd still be room for India, Argentina, Algeria, and Britain.

Across that much space, Brazil's particular brand of Portuguese has had room to evolve over time. The language has morphed with variations in indigenous populations, heavily influenced by the many different African dialects of slaves brought over since the 1500's.

Nowadays, are the differences so great that someone with a basic or textbook knowledge of Portuguese will find it difficult to understand regional dialects?

A Universal Language?

Though Brazilian people can trace their history back to Europe, Africa, and Latin America, the language tends to be fairly unified because of the popularity of telenovelas, or soap operas. This TV style's widespread popularity has led to an almost ubiquitous adoption of the dialect used in mass media.

The economic and cultural sway of both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro further encourages Brazil's citizens to pick up mass-market dialects. These days, many and urban Brazilians in particular can understand the formulaic language, both in speech and written word.

It's Not All Easy

But don't get too comfortable. Complete understanding may elude the foreigner who's received formal training in Portuguese when the spoken language often departs from what's written.

If you're visiting Brazil, be sure to familiarize yourself with the way Brazilian's speak. Foreigners will find regional differences in accent and conjugations of certain verbs, and due to Brazil's relative isolation within South America, speaking English and Spanish will only get them so far.

Although Brazilians use a much more formal language than in European Portuguese territories, many Brazilians in rural areas don't have access to formal education, meaning slang and colloquialisms have come to dominate over the years. Although in the big cities, you will find many Brazilians speak formally, if you venture to the lesser-visited areas where the population isn't accustomed to tourists, the dialect can vary greatly and communication can be a challenge.

Northern Dialects

Variations occur along geographical lines; you can separate the country's dialects into northern and southern groups. Northern dialects, used in the Amazonian (Amazonico) and Northeastern (Nordestino) regions tend to use open, pre-stressed vowels.

The Amazonian language dialect resembles European Portuguese, especially in and around the city of Belém. Pronouns are shortened, so você is typically reduced to cê (though seen in other regions of Brazil, in the Amazonian, this trend is more prevalent), and vowels are pronounced differently, as explained in-depth by Caleb Everett from the University of Miami.

There are many complex rules relating to how Northeasterns in particular pronounce vowels as well; for the general majority, open vowels are not exclusively used in stressed syllables. In the northern regions, including Amazonia, the vowels are nasalized in virtually all cases, while in the south fewer people make such a nasal sound.

Bahian (Baiano) Portuguese

Going back to its African roots, much of the Bahian dialect takes inspiration from those who migrated from Africa or were brought over as slaves.

If you're heading to Bahia, you'll find slang takes center stage and many of the words used are likely the antithesis of what you've been taught if you know some Brazilian Portuguese. For example, though the word "pivete" usually denotes "thief" around the rest of Brazil, it means "friend" in Bahia. Words like "bróder," taken from the English word brother, are also used to greet friends.

Abbreviations are likewise popular in the area. If you want to catch a bus, the driver is referred to as motô rather than the full word, which is motorista. Similarly, the fare collector will be referred to as cobra. Cobra still refers to the snake species, but in this case, locals use a shortened version of

Fluminense Portuguese

Fluminense Portuguese is most associated with the city of Rio de Janeiro and as such, although it contains a lot of slang, it is more closely related to the formal Portuguese language. When it comes to speaking the language, most words are said how they are written and in this way Fluminese takes influence from Portugal, Germany and France.

Fluminense is the dialect used on TV Globo, the most-viewed TV service in Brazil. The majority of the country's celebrities and journalists have adopted Fluminese, which helped the dialect become the most popular dialect in the country.

The only catch: many consider Fluminese too similar to the formal version of European Portuguese. Enthusiasts find it boring and other regions of Brazil dislike it in comparison to more flavorful local dialects.

Mineiro Portuguese

Prevalent only in a very small area of the country, in the highlands, the Mineiro dialect is one of the least spoken variants. Least like formal Brazilian Portuguese of all the dialects, it is not largely understood outside of the region.

Words are often merged more in this region, resulting in a faster pace of speech. A common question, para onde nós estamos indo? meaning "Where are we going?", changes to pronoistamuíno? in Mineiro.

Parallel, adjectives and nouns are often made singular; meus filhos, for example, meaning my children, becomes meus filho.

Sulina (Sulista) Portuguese

Sulina, or Southern Portuguese is spoken across the biggest region of Brazil, covering São Paulo up to Brazil's borders with Uruguay and Paraguay.

Like the Fluminense dialect, Sulina is more formal than those employed in the smaller areas, but unlike Fluminese, Sulina comes with its share of deviations from "generic" Brazilian Portuguese. Also known as Caipira, the language took its roots from Galician Portuguese and a Tupian Portuguese-like Creole language used by the Jesuits, with some Italian-influenced elements thrown in for good measure.

In Sulina, "l" is more commonly replaced with an "r" sound, while the word meaning no ( não) has two forms - não for short replies and num for negative phrases. As is the case with Mineiro, plurals are often replaced with singular articles or pronouns, while the adjective remains plural.

How Brazilian Dialects Have Spread

Because of migration from northern to southern states, the South has extended some sway over the languages of the North. It's important to note that dialects in Brazil tend to have cultural significance. People with a Gaúcho accent, for example, are proud of the fact and are not easily influenced by other regions.

Students of Portuguese should remember that there are distinctions between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Since colonization, the two languages have departed from one another, leading to differences in both pronunciation and grammar. Brazilian Portuguese has felt the influence of African and Amerindian languages, leading to independent development.

Tune In

Before you visit the Brazil, or if you're already in town for the World Cup, try catching up on some soap operas or listening to radio broadcasts from the region you're visiting. This will help you acclimatize to the accent, so you're more comfortable while abroad.

Whether you're on site or watching and listening from home, if the exposure to Brazil has you falling in love with Brazilian Portuguese, check out the World Cup-inspired language-learning programs from Language Trainers. Their qualified tutors have a special sensitivity to and lots of familiarity with Brazil's exciting brand of Portuguese!

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How Do Dialects Vary Around Brazil? #WorldCup - Listen & Learn USA

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When Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, does dialect variation across its vast territories make the local language easier or harder to learn? Do regional differences present language barriers to non-native speakers with only a basic understanding of Portuguese? Brazil stretches over 3.28 million square miles.

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Este pagina do internet nao fala do português brasileiro especificamente, mas eu gostei porque dá uma boa explicação da diferença entre gramática descritiva e prescritiva. Eu acho que estou é muito importante para entender a dinâmica de português formal e português informal em brasil. Também para entender por faz uma diferença tão grande entre português escrito e português falado.

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Long-time readers of fandom_grammar know that not infrequently, in giving an answer, we will make a distinction between what is grammatically correct and what is most often used. For example, we might say, "X is the rule, but people don't really talk that way. So in dialog, go ahead and have your character say Y instead."

I suspect that some of you might find yourselves a little frustrated with that sort of equivocation and would much rather know whether it is a rule or it isn't. After all, isn't that why you asked the question in the first place? And that others of you breathe a great sigh of relief, because you thought you remembered from grade school that X was correct, but it just sounds so unnatural in conversation, and now you have justification to use Y.

Welcome to the great divide between prescriptive and descriptive grammar.

Briefly, in language, whether it's regarding grammar, usage, syntax, spelling or whatever, prescriptivism refers to the establishment of and adherence to rules or standards. Descriptivism refers to the observation of how the language is used by the people who speak and write it.

You've heard of the grammar police? Those are prescriptivists. They're like cops who prefer rules and order, live in a meticulous loft with color-coded Tupperware, and wear an apron when they cook because it's practical. And descriptivists are like hippie anthropologists, who observe and record but aren't about judgment and don't get all hung up on house rules like "No sex in the loft." ... Okay, I promise I won't turn this whole thing into an analogy based on The Sentinel. But I am amused by how well it would work.

In academic circles, there is sometimes heated conflict between the prescriptivists and descriptivists. It's actually quite an interesting argument, and if you go in for that sort of thing I would recommend the essay "Making Peace in the Language Wars," which prefaces Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage. The topic is not as narrow as it may first appear, and touches on issues of multiculturalism, classism, and privilege.

That there is conflict may seem odd when you consider how intrinsically these two approaches to language study are linked. After all, the dictionary prescriptively tells us what words mean and how they ought to be spelled, yet it was compiled through written examples of how authors used the words, and with each edition new words are added, which is descriptive. But when you remember that on one hand you have people who say, "'Could care less' means the exact opposite of 'couldn't care less'," while on the other you have people who say, "But you know what I mean when I say it, and that's what matters," perhaps it does not seem so odd after all.

English is a living language and, as such, it is constantly evolving. This sort of evolution can be clearly seen on a more dramatic scale by looking at the Romance languages: They share a common ancestor in Latin, which spread across much of Europe with the Roman Empire. Highly prescriptive Classical Latin remained the language of the Western (Roman Catholic) Church and was used by scholars and political leaders across nations for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire - even finding its way into English grammar, though English is not one of the Romance languages. Yet meanwhile, Vulgar (spoken) Latin evolved with existing language and geographical and political divisions to create, in descriptive fashion, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.

Now let's look at English. How many readers today struggle to understand Shakespeare, much less the Middle English writings of Chaucer (which few of us can muddle through without a translation to one side) or Old English, nigh unrecognizable as a related language? Given the scope and constancy of this evolution, the inevitability of change, one might wonder why prescriptivists even bother. However, a prescriptivist would argue that just because the rules will change in the future doesn't mean they do not provide a valuable foundation in the present.

Both prescriptivists and descriptivists believe that they are arguing on behalf of greater language facility and expressiveness, and they are. They just have different theories as to how to best go about it. To go all Kinsey on you, most language users exist along a prescriptive/descriptive spectrum. We believe that language ought to be precise and universally understood enough to convey that which we want it to convey, but adaptive enough to allow for individual expression and new ideas. It's just that we all seem to have our own notion of where that line is, and it changes according to the kind of communication that we are conducting.

So how does all of this apply to us as writers of fanfiction?

Writers are expected to be conversant in multiple forms of English grammar. Just as we would use different language in a résumé than we would for a research paper or a personal email, we can use different grammar in our fiction. Often the narrative portions of a story will follow more prescriptive strictures while the dialog reflects descriptive usage. And even within the narrative portion, a story written entirely according to the current rules of standard grammar will have a different feel than one written in vernacular. Being familiar with both the prescriptive and descriptive aspects of grammar gives us greater flexibility as writers.

Another area where prescriptive vs. descriptive can crop up in fanfic is between a writer and a beta reader. Many beta readers tend toward prescriptivism. Is the beta reader clarifying the text or drowning the authorial voice in standard English? Is the writer an innovative user of colloquial language or too much of a special snowflake to be bothered with the rules? In the nonprofessional world of fanfic, we have the luxury of finding another person to work with who may fall closer to us on the prescriptive/descriptive scale. Or we can continue working with someone whose approach is a far cry from our own; understanding the ideology driving a conflict can help us gain from a different perspective.

Long-time readers of fandom_grammar know that not infrequently, in giving an answer, we will make a distinction between what is grammatically correct and what is most often used. For example, we might say, "X is the rule, but people don't really talk that way. So in dialog, go ahead and have your character say Y instead."

I suspect that some of you might find yourselves a little frustrated with that sort of equivocation and would much rather know whether it is a rule or it isn't. After all, isn't that why you asked the question in the first place? And that others of you breathe a great sigh of relief, because you thought you remembered from grade school that X was correct, but it just sounds so unnatural in conversation, and now you have justification to use Y.

Welcome to the great divide between prescriptive and descriptive grammar.

Briefly, in language, whether it's regarding grammar, usage, syntax, spelling or whatever, prescriptivism refers to the establishment of and adherence to rules or standards. Descriptivism refers to the observation of how the language is used by the people who speak and write it.

You've heard of the grammar police? Those are prescriptivists. They're like cops who prefer rules and order, live in a meticulous loft with color-coded Tupperware, and wear an apron when they cook because it's practical. And descriptivists are like hippie anthropologists, who observe and record but aren't about judgment and don't get all hung up on house rules like "No sex in the loft." ... Okay, I promise I won't turn this whole thing into an analogy based on The Sentinel. But I am amused by how well it would work.

In academic circles, there is sometimes heated conflict between the prescriptivists and descriptivists. It's actually quite an interesting argument, and if you go in for that sort of thing I would recommend the essay "Making Peace in the Language Wars," which prefaces Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage. The topic is not as narrow as it may first appear, and touches on issues of multiculturalism, classism, and privilege.

That there is conflict may seem odd when you consider how intrinsically these two approaches to language study are linked. After all, the dictionary prescriptively tells us what words mean and how they ought to be spelled, yet it was compiled through written examples of how authors used the words, and with each edition new words are added, which is descriptive. But when you remember that on one hand you have people who say, "'Could care less' means the exact opposite of 'couldn't care less'," while on the other you have people who say, "But you know what I mean when I say it, and that's what matters," perhaps it does not seem so odd after all.

English is a living language and, as such, it is constantly evolving. This sort of evolution can be clearly seen on a more dramatic scale by looking at the Romance languages: They share a common ancestor in Latin, which spread across much of Europe with the Roman Empire. Highly prescriptive Classical Latin remained the language of the Western (Roman Catholic) Church and was used by scholars and political leaders across nations for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire - even finding its way into English grammar, though English is not one of the Romance languages. Yet meanwhile, Vulgar (spoken) Latin evolved with existing language and geographical and political divisions to create, in descriptive fashion, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.

Now let's look at English. How many readers today struggle to understand Shakespeare, much less the Middle English writings of Chaucer (which few of us can muddle through without a translation to one side) or Old English, nigh unrecognizable as a related language? Given the scope and constancy of this evolution, the inevitability of change, one might wonder why prescriptivists even bother. However, a prescriptivist would argue that just because the rules will change in the future doesn't mean they do not provide a valuable foundation in the present.

Both prescriptivists and descriptivists believe that they are arguing on behalf of greater language facility and expressiveness, and they are. They just have different theories as to how to best go about it. To go all Kinsey on you, most language users exist along a prescriptive/descriptive spectrum. We believe that language ought to be precise and universally understood enough to convey that which we want it to convey, but adaptive enough to allow for individual expression and new ideas. It's just that we all seem to have our own notion of where that line is, and it changes according to the kind of communication that we are conducting.

So how does all of this apply to us as writers of fanfiction?

Writers are expected to be conversant in multiple forms of English grammar. Just as we would use different language in a résumé than we would for a research paper or a personal email, we can use different grammar in our fiction. Often the narrative portions of a story will follow more prescriptive strictures while the dialog reflects descriptive usage. And even within the narrative portion, a story written entirely according to the current rules of standard grammar will have a different feel than one written in vernacular. Being familiar with both the prescriptive and descriptive aspects of grammar gives us greater flexibility as writers.

Another area where prescriptive vs. descriptive can crop up in fanfic is between a writer and a beta reader. Many beta readers tend toward prescriptivism. Is the beta reader clarifying the text or drowning the authorial voice in standard English? Is the writer an innovative user of colloquial language or too much of a special snowflake to be bothered with the rules? In the nonprofessional world of fanfic, we have the luxury of finding another person to work with who may fall closer to us on the prescriptive/descriptive scale. Or we can continue working with someone whose approach is a far cry from our own; understanding the ideology driving a conflict can help us gain from a different perspective.

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Emoticons cannot convey my hilarity (mendax) wrote in fandom_grammar,

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Feature: Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar

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Long-time readers of fandom_grammar know that not infrequently, in giving an answer, we will make a distinction between what is grammatically correct and what is most often used. For example, we might say, "X is the rule, but people don't really talk that way. So in dialog, go ahead and have your...

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Eu gostei muito deste blog, porque fala da importância de saber as diferenças em o português escrito e o português falado. Não dá uma explicação muito profunda de por que as coisas são assim mas dá uns exemplos de como um brasileiro falaria algo e como o escrever.

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Colloquial Portuguese: Putting "Não" At The End of Sentences One of the most important things to bear in mind when learning Portuguese is that there is a big difference between written Portguese, which is more formal and sticks to the grammar books, and oral Portuguese, which is a whole different story.

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Este link foi muito interessante para mim porque fala um pouco da historia da lingua portuguesa. Nos ensina como viajo a muitas diferentes regiões e também como o contacto que tive com diferentes culturas a influenciou. Eu gostei muito porque também dá exemplos de como diferentes variações de português tem características particulares.

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Portuguese ( português , língua portuguesa) is a Romance language originated in what is today Galicia (Spain) and northern Portugal. It is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, and co-official with Chinese in the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau and Tetum in East Timor.

Portuguese is ranked sixth among the world's languages in number of native speakers (over 200 million), and first in South America (186 million, over 51% of the population). It is also a major lingua franca in Africa. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th century as Portugal set up a vast colonial and commercial empire (1415-1999), spanning from Brazil in the Americas to Macau in China. In that colonial period, many Portuguese creoles appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Portuguese is often nicknamed The language of Camões, after the author of the Portuguese national epic The Lusiadas; The last flower of Latium ( Olavo Bilac); and The sweet language by Cervantes.

Geographic distribution

Portuguese is the official language in Angola, Brazil, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe as first language, and the most widely used language in Mozambique. It is also one of the official languages of East Timor (with Tetum) and of the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau (with Chinese). It is widely spoken, but not official, in Andorra, Luxembourg, Namibia and Paraguay (in the latter country there were 112,520 native Portuguese speakers according to the 2002 census). Portuguese Creoles are the mother tongue of Cape Verde and part of Guinea-Bissau's population. In Cape Verde most also speak standard Portuguese and have a native level language usage.

Large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities exist in many cities around the world, including Montreal and Toronto in Canada; Paris in France; Asunción in Paraguay; and Boston, New Bedford, Cape Cod, Fall River, Honolulu, Houston, Newark, New York City, Orlando, Miami, Providence, Sacramento in the United States; Buenos Aires in Argentina, Uruguay, and in Japan. Other countries where speakers can be found include in Andorra, Belgium, Bermuda, Switzerland and some communities in India such as Goa. Portuguese is spoken by about 188 million people in South America, 17 million in Africa, 12 million in Europe, 2 million in North America and 610,000 in Asia.

The CPLP or Community of Portuguese Language Countries is an international organization consisting of the eight independent countries which have Portuguese as an official language. Portuguese is also an official language of the European Union, Mercosul and the African Union (one of the working languages) and one of the official languages of other organizations. The Portuguese language is gaining popularity in Africa, Asia, and South America as a second language for study.

Portuguese is with Spanish the fastest growing western language, and, following estimates by UNESCO it is the language with the higher potentiality of growth as an international communication language in Africa (south) and South America. The Portuguese speaking African countries are expected to have a combined population of 83 million by 2050. After Brazil signed into the economic market of Mercosul with other South America nations, such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, there has been an increase in curiosity towards study of Portuguese language in those South American countries. The demographic weight of Brazil in the continent will continue to strengthen the presence of Portuguese language in the region.

The language is also starting to gain popularity in Asia, mostly due to East Timor's boost in the number of speakers in the last five years, and Macau is becoming the Chinese centre for learning Portuguese, where in early 21st century, the language use was in decline, today it is growing as it became a language for opportunity due to increased Chinese diplomatic and financial ties with the Portuguese speaking countries.

In March of 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language, was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, the city with the largest number of Portuguese speakers in the world.

Portuguese is a pluricentric language. It has two main groups of dialects, those of Brazil and those of the Old World. For historical reasons, the dialects of Africa and Asia are generally closer to those of Portugal than the Brazilian dialects, although in some aspects of their phonology, especially the pronunciation of unstressed vowels, they resemble Brazilian Portuguese more than European Portuguese. They have not been studied as exhaustively as European and Brazilian Portuguese. In various parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Portuguese creoles are spoken, but they are independent languages which should not be confused with Portuguese itself.

Within the two major varieties of Portuguese, most differences between dialects concern pronunciation and vocabulary. Below are some examples:

Between Brazilian Portuguese, particularly in its most informal varieties, and European Portuguese, there can be considerable differences in grammar, as well. The most prominent ones concern the placement of clitic pronouns, and the use of subject pronouns as objects in the third person. Non-standard inflections are also common in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese.

Classification and related languages

Portuguese belongs to the West Iberian branch of the Romance languages, and it has special ties with the following members of this group:

Galician and the Fala, its closest relatives. See below.

Spanish, the major language closest to Portuguese. See also Differences between Spanish and Portuguese.

Mirandese, another West Iberian language spoken in Portugal.

Judeo-Portuguese and Judeo-Spanish, languages spoken by Sephardic Jews, which remained close to Portuguese and Spanish.

Latin and other Romance languages

A distinctive feature of Portuguese is that it preserved the stressed vowels of Vulgar Latin, which other Romance languages diphthongized; cf. Fr. pierre, Sp. piedra, Port. pedra, from Lat. petra; or Sp. fuego, It. fuoco, Port. fogo, from Lat. focum. Another characteristic of early Portuguese was the loss of intervocalic l and n, sometimes followed by the merger of the two surrounding vowels, or by the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between them: cf. Lat. salire, tenere, catena, Sp. salir, tener, cadena, Port. sair, ter, cadeia.

When the elided consonant was n, it often nasalized the preceding vowel: cf. Lat. manum, rana, bonum, Port. mão, rãa (now rã), bõo (now bom). This process was the source of most of the nasal diphthongs which are typical of Portuguese. In particular, the Latin endings -ane-, -anu- and -one- became -ão in most cases: cf. Lat. canem, germanum, rationem with Modern Port. cão, irmão, razão, and their plurals cães, irmãos, razões.

See Portuguese Vocabulary: From Latin to Portuguese, for other sound changes.

In spite of the obvious lexical and grammatical similarities between Portuguese and other Romance languages outside the West Iberian branch, it is not mutually intelligible with them to any practical extent. Portuguese speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary, before being able to understand even the simplest sentences in those languages (and vice-versa):

Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)

Ela fecha sempre a fiestra antes de cear. ( Galician)
Ella cierra siempre la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)
Ella tanca sempre la finestra abans de sopar. ( Catalan)
Lei chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. ( Italian)
Ea închide întotdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina. ( Romanian)
Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner/souper. (French)
She always shuts the window before dining.

Note that some of the lexical divergence above actually comes from different Romance languages using the same root word with different semantic values. Portuguese for example has the word fresta, which is a cognate of French fenêtre or Italian finestra and so on, but now means "slit" as opposed to "window." Likewise, Portuguese also has the word cear, a cognate of Italian cenare and Spanish cenar, but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper", while the most frequent word meaning "to dine" is actually jantar (related to archaic Sp. yantar) due to semantic changes in the 19th Century.

Galician has both fiestra (from medieval fẽestra which is the ultimate origin of standard Portuguese fresta), and the less frequently used xanela. Like the northern dialects of Portuguese, it still uses cear with its original meaning of "dining".

Galician and the Fala

The closest language to Portuguese is Galician, spoken in the autonomous community of Galicia (northwestern Spain). The two were at one time a single language, known today as Galician-Portuguese, but since the political separation of Portugal from Galicia they have diverged somewhat, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary. Nevertheless, the core vocabulary and grammar of Galician are still noticeably closer to Portuguese than to Spanish. In particular, it uses the future subjunctive, the personal infinitive, and the synthetic pluperfect (see the section on the grammar of Portuguese, below). Mutual intelligibility is good between Galicians and northern Portuguese, but poorer between Galicians and speakers from central Portugal.

The linguistic status of Galician with respect to Portuguese is controversial. Some authors, such as Lindley Cintra, consider that they are still dialects of a common language, in spite of superficial differences in phonology and vocabulary. Others, such as Pilar Vázquez Cuesta, argue that they have become separate languages due to major differences in phonetics and vocabulary usage, and, to a lesser extent, morphology and syntax. The official position of the Galician Language Institute is that Galician and Portuguese should be considered independent languages. The standard orthography takes advantage of the divergent features of the phonology of Galician to emphasize its differences from Portuguese, insisting on a phonetic spelling, and rejecting for example Portuguese graphic conventions like the graphemes nh, lh, j in favour of ñ, ll, x. See also Reintegrationism.

The Fala language is another descendant of Galician-Portuguese, spoken by a small number of people in the Spanish towns of Valverdi du Fresnu, As Ellas and Sa Martín de Trebellu (autonomous community of Extremadura, near the border with Portugal).

Derived languages

Beginning in the 16th century, the extensive contacts between Portuguese travelers and settlers, African slaves, and local populations led to the appearance of many pidgins with varying amounts of Portuguese influence. As these pidgins became the mother tongue of succeeding generations, they evolved into fully fledged creole languages, which remained in use in many parts of Asia and Africa until the 18th century.

Some Portuguese-based or Portuguese-influenced creoles are still spoken today, by over 3 million people worldwide, especially people of partial Portuguese ancestry.

Influence on other languages

Many languages have borrowed words from Portuguese, such as Indonesian, Malay, Konkani, Tetum, Xitsonga, Papiamentu, Japanese, Lanc-Patuá (spoken in northern Brazil - now extinct) and Sranang Tongo (spoken in Suriname). It left a strong influence on the língua brasílica, a Tupi-Guarani language which was the most widely spoken in Brazil until the 18th century, and on the language spoken around Sikka in Flores Island, Indonesia. In nearby Larantuka, Portuguese is used for prayers in the Tuan Ma ritual.

The Japanese-Portuguese dictionary Nippo Jisho (1603) was the first dictionary of Japanese in a European language, a product of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan. Building on the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries, the Dictionarium Anamiticum, Lusitanum et Latinum (Annamite-Portuguese-Latin dictionary) of Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) introduced quốc ngữ, the modern orthography of Vietnamese, which is based on the orthography of 17th-century Portuguese. The Romanization of Chinese was also influenced by the Portuguese language (among others), particularly regarding Chinese surnames; one example is "Mei".

See also:

List of English words of Portuguese origin

Loan words in Indonesian

Japanese words from Portuguese

Borrowed words in Malay

Sinhala words of Portuguese origin

Loan words from Portuguese in Sri Lankan Tamil

Arriving in the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, the Romans brought with them the Latin language, from which all Romance languages descend. In the 2nd century BC, southern Lusitania was already Romanized. Strabo, a 1st century Greek geographer, remarks in his Geographia "encyclopedia": "they have adopted the Roman customs, and they no longer remember their own language." The language was spread by arriving Roman soldiers, settlers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous civilizations.

Between 409 A.D. and 711, as the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Germanic peoples ( Migration Period). The newcomers, mainly Suevi and Visigoths, quickly adopted late Roman culture and the Vulgar Latin dialects of the peninsula. After the Moorish invasion of 711, Arabic became the administrative language in the conquered regions, but most of the population continued to speak a form of Romance commonly known as Mozarabic. The influence exerted by Arabic on the Romance dialects spoken in the Christian kingdoms of the north was small, affecting mainly their lexicon.

The earliest surviving records of a distinctively Portuguese language are administrative documents of the 9th century, still interspersed with many Latin phrases. Today this phase is known as Proto-Portuguese (between the 9th and the 12th century). Portugal was formally recognized as an independent nation by the Kingdom of Leon in 1143, with Afonso Henriques as king. In the first period of Old Portuguese - Portuguese-Galician Period (from the 12th to the 14th century) - the language gradually came into general use. Previously it had been the language of preference for lyric poetry in Christian Iberia, much like Occitan was the language of the poetry of the troubadors. In 1290, king Denis created the first Portuguese University in Lisbon (the Estudo Geral) and decreed that Portuguese, then simply called the "Vulgar language" should be known as the Portuguese language and used officially.

In the second period of Old Portuguese, from the 14th to the 16th century, with the Portuguese discoveries, the language was taken to many regions of Asia, Africa and the Americas (nowadays, the great majority of Portuguese speakers live in Brazil, in South America). By the 16th century it had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. Its spread was helped by mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people, and by its association with Roman Catholic missionary efforts, which led to the formation of a creole called cristão ("Christian") in many parts of Asia. The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.

The end of the Old Portuguese period was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende, in 1516. The early times of Modern Portuguese, which spans from the 16th century to present day, were characterized by an increase in the number of erudite words borrowed from Classical Latin and Classical Greek during the Renaissance, which greatly enriched the lexicon.

Vocabulary

Almost 90% of the lexicon of Portuguese is derived from Latin. Nevertheless, thanks to the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and to the participation of Portugal in the Age of Discovery, it has adopted loanwords from all over the world.

Very few Portuguese words can be traced to the pre-Roman inhabitants of Portugal, which included the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Iberians, Lusitanians, and Celts. Some notable examples are abóbora "pumpkin" and bezerro "year-old calf", from Iberian languages; cerveja "beer", from Celtic; saco "bag", from Phoenician; and cachorro "dog, puppy", from Basque.

In the 5th century the Iberian Peninsula (the former Roman region of Hispania) was conquered by the Suevi, Visigoths and Alans, Germanic tribes who had been displaced from Central Europe by the Huns. As they adopted the Roman civilization and language, however, these people contributed only a few words to the lexicon, mostly related to warfare - such as espora "spur", estaca "stake", and guerra "war", from Gothic *spaúra, *stakka, and *wirro, respectively.

Between the 9th and the 15th centuries Portuguese acquired about 1000 words from Arabic by influence of Moorish Iberia. They are often recognizable by the initial Arabic article a( l)-, and include many common words such as aldeia "village" from التجارية aldaya, alface "lettuce" from الخس alkhass, armazém "warehouse" from المخزن almahazan, and azeite "olive oil" from زيت azzait. From Arabic came also the grammatically peculiar word oxalá "God willing". The name of the Portuguese town of Fátima, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, is originally the name of one of the daughters of Muhammad.

Starting in the 15th century, the Portuguese maritime explorations led to the introduction of many loanwords from Asian languages. For instance, catana "cutlass" from Japanese katana; corja "rabble" from Malay kórchchu; and chá "tea" from Chinese chá.

From South America came batata " potato", from Taino; ananás and abacaxi, from Tupi-Guarani naná and Tupi ibá cati, respectively (two species of pineapple), and tucano " toucan" from Guarani tucan.

From the 16th to the 19th century, the role of Portugal as intermediary in the Atlantic slave trade, with the establishment of large Portuguese colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil, Portuguese got several words of African and Amerind origin, especially names for most of the animals and plants found in those territories. While those terms are mostly used in the former colonies, many became current in European Portuguese as well. From Kimbundu, for example, came kifumate → cafuné "head caress", kusula → caçula "youngest child", marimbondo "tropical wasp", and kubungula → bungular "to dance like a wizard".

Finally, it has received a steady influx of loanwords from other European languages. For example, melena "hair lock", fiambre "wet-cured ham" (in contrast with presunto "dry-cured ham" from latin prae-exsuctus "dehydrated"), and castelhano "Castilian", from Spanish; colchete/ crochê "bracket"/"crochet", paletó "jacket", batom "lipstick", and filé/ filete "steak"/"slice" respectively, from French crochet, paletot, bâton, filet; macarrão "pasta"", piloto "pilot", carroça "carriage", and barraca "barrack", from Italian maccarone, pilotto, carrozza, barracca; and bife "steak", futebol, revólver, estoque, folclore, from English beef, football, revolver, stock, folklore.

Writing system

Portuguese is written with the Latin alphabet, and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla, to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. Brazilian Portuguese also uses the diaeresis mark. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.

Brazilian vs. European spelling

There are some differences between the orthographies of Brazil and other Portuguese language countries. One of the most pervasive is the use of acute accents in the European/African orthography in many words such as sinónimo, where the Brazilian orthography has a circumflex accent, sinônimo. Another important difference is that Brazilian spelling often lacks c or t before c, ç, or t, where the European orthography has them; for example, cf. Brazilian fato with European facto, "fact", or Brazilian objeto with European objecto, "object". Some of these spelling differences reflect differences in the pronunciation of the words, but others are merely graphic.

There is a maximum of 9 oral vowels and 19 consonants, though some varieties of the language have fewer phonemes (Brazilian Portuguese has only 7 oral vowel phonemes). There are also five nasal vowels, which some linguists regard as allophones of the oral vowels, ten oral diphthongs, and five nasal diphthongs.

To the seven vowels of Vulgar Latin, European Portuguese has added two near central vowels, one of which tends to be elided in rapid speech, like the e caduc of French. The high vowels /e o/ and the low vowels /ɛ ɔ/ are four distinct phonemes, and they alternate in various forms of apophony. Like Catalan, Portuguese uses vowel quality to contrast stressed syllables with unstressed syllables: isolated vowels tend to be raised, and in some cases centralized, when unstressed. Nasal diphthongs occur mostly at the end of words.

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Portuguese is fairly conservative. The medieval affricates /ts/, /dz/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/ merged with the fricatives /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, respectively, but not with each other, and there were no other significant changes to the consonant phonemes since then. However, some remarkable dialectal variants and allophones have appeared, among which:

In many regions of Brazil, /t/ and /d/ have the affricate allophones [tʃ] and [dʒ], respectively, before /i/. ( Quebec French has a similar phenomenon, with alveolar affricates instead of postalveolars.)

At the end of a syllable, the phoneme /l/ has the velarized allophone [ɫ] in European Portuguese, like in the Received Pronunciation of English. Brazilian Portuguese has the allophone [w] instead ( L-vocalization).

In many parts of Brazil and Angola, /ɲ/ is pronounced as a nasal glide [j̃] that nasalizes the preceding vowel, so that for instance /'niɲu/ is pronounced ['nĩj̃u].

There is considerable dialectal variation in the value of the rhotic phonemes /ɾ/ and /ʁ/. See Guttural R in Portuguese, for details.

In most of Brazil, the alveolar sibilants /s/ and /z/ occur in complementary distribution at the end of syllables, depending on whether the consonant that follows is voiceless or voiced, as in English. But in most of Portugal and parts of Brazil sibilants at the end of syllables are postalveolar, /ʃ/ before voiceless consonants, and /ʒ/ before voiced consonants. (In Judeo-Spanish, /s/ is often replaced with /ʃ/ at the end of syllables, too.)

Primary stress may fall on any of the three final syllables of a word, but mostly on the last two. There is a partial correlation between the position of the stress and the final vowel; for example, the final syllable is usually stressed when it contains a nasal phoneme, a diphthong, or a close vowel. The orthography of Portuguese takes advantage of this correlation to minimize the number of diacritics.

Due to the phonetic changes that often affect unstressed vowels, pure lexical stress is less common in Portuguese than in related languages like Spanish, but there is still a significant number of examples of it:

dúvida /ˈduvidɐ/ "doubt" (noun) vs. duvida /duˈvidɐ/ "he doubts"

falaram /faˈlaɾɐ̃ũ/ "they spoke" vs. falarão /falaˈɾɐ̃ũ/ "they will speak" (Brazilian pronunciation)
ouve /'ovi/ "he hears" vs. ouvi /o'vi/ "I heard" (Brazilian pronunciation)
túnel /'tunɛl/ "tunnel" vs. tonel /tu'nɛl/ "wine cask" (European pronunciation)

Tone is not lexically significant in Portuguese, but phrase- and sentence-level tone are important. There are of six dynamic tone patterns that affect entire phrases, which indicate the mood and intention of the speaker such as implication, emphasis, reservation, etc. As in most Romance languages, interrogation is expressed mainly by sharply raising the tone at the end of the sentence.

Indo-European characteristics

It is a synthetic, fusional, nominative-accusative language.

Romance characteristics

Nouns, adjectives and articles are only moderately inflected (though moreso than in English). There are two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, and two grammatical numbers, singular and plural. Case marking on nouns has been completely lost, though a trace of it survives in the personal pronouns.

Verbs are highly inflected, normally having over 50 different forms. There are numerous periphrastic verbal constructions, as well. There are three tenses, past, present and future; three moods, indicative, subjunctive, and imperative; and three aspects, imperfect, perfective, and progressive (perfective and progressive forms are mostly periphrastic). It has a conditional form distinct from the subjunctive, and two verbs "to be". It is a null-subject language. Typical word order is SVO, though it is generally less strict than in English.

Galician-Portuguese characteristics

The future subjunctive tense, which was developed by medieval West Iberian Romance, but has now fallen into disuse in Spanish, is still used in vernacular Portuguese. It appears in dependent clauses that denote a condition which must be fulfilled in the future, so that the independent clause will occur. Other languages normally employ the present tense under the same circumstances:

eleito presidente, mudarei a lei. [future subjunctive]
If I am elected president, I will change the law.

Quando você for mais velho, vai entender. [future subjunctive]
When you are older, you will understand.

Personal infinitive: it is possible for an infinitive verb to agree with its subject in person and number, often showing who is supposed to perform a certain act; cf. É melhor voltares "It is better [for you] to go back.", É melhor voltarmos "It is better [for us] to go back." Perhaps for this reason, infinitive clauses replace subjunctive clauses more often in Portuguese than in other Romance languages.

Unique features

The Portuguese present perfect has an iterative sense which is unique among the Romance languages. It denotes an action or a series of actions which began in the past and are expected to keep repeating in the future. For instance, the meaning of Tenho tentado falar com ela may be closer to "I have been trying to talk to her" than to "I have tried to talk to her", depending on the context. On the other hand, the correct translation of the question "Have you heard the latest news?" is not *Tem ouvido a última notícia?, but Ouviu a última notícia?, since no repetition is implied.

Original

IPA ( EP pronunciation)

IPA ( BP pronunciation)

Translation (by Landeg White)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Portuguese ( português , língua portuguesa) is a Romance language originated in what is today Galicia (Spain) and northern Portugal. It is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, and co-official with Chinese in the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau and Tetum in East Timor.

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Eu gostei muito deste artigo porque fala dos câmbios que tem acontecido na língua portuguesa. Especificamente fala los cambios lexicales e dá muito exemplos de estas diferencias e os fatores que as causaram.

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Abstract

This work, which is couched in the theoretical framework of Articulatory Phonology, deals with the influence of speech rate on the change/variation from antepenultimate stress words into penultimate stress words in Brazilian Portuguese. Both acoustic and articulatory (EMMA) studies were conducted. On the acoustic side, results show different patterns of post-stressed vowel reduction according to the word type. Some words reduced their medial post-stressed vowels more than their final post-stressed vowels, and others reduced their final post-stressed vowels more than their medial post-stressed vowels. On the articulatory side, results show that the coarticulation degree of the post-stressed consonants increases with speech rate. Also, with the use of a measure called proportional consonantal interval (PCI), it was found in measurements of articulation that such measure is influenced by the word type. Three different groups of words were found according to their PCI. These results show how dynamical aspects influenced by speech rate increase are related to the lexical process of change/variation from antepenultimate stress words into penultimate ones.

Keywords: speech rate, dynamical systems, Articulatory Phonology, linguistic change, lexical variation

1 Introduction

It is generally known by linguists who study Portuguese that some Old Portuguese antepenultimate stress words have undergone change into penultimate stress words. Besides, these words can synchronically covary with each other in Modern Portuguese. For most of these words, this phenomenon is related to the linguistic process known as syncope, that is, word-internal elision(cf. Câmara-Jr., 1988, p. 220). Diachronically, a syncope of the medial post-stressed vowel in antepenultimate stress words started in Classical Latin (saeculum > saeclum; calidus > calmus; eremus > ermus) (cf. Quednau, 2002), and continued in Vulgar Latin (speculum > speclum; angulus > anglus; oculus > oclus) (cf. Appendix Probi citations commented in Silva-Neto, 1946, p. 140).

Historically, there was since Classical Latin (cf. Nunes, 1969, p. 13) a gradual change from antepenultimate stress words into penultimate stress words, resulting in very rare realizations of antepenultimate stress words in Old Portuguese (derived from Vulgar Latin) ( Nunes, 1973; de Vasconcelos, 1956). Besides, even these rare forms, according to Hauy (1994, p. 42), became penultimate ones in connected speech. Summing up, the use of these words gradually decreased in the following way: Classical Latin > Vulgar Latin > Old Portuguese. Nevertheless, in the fifteenth century, in which Latin culture became greatly valued, antepenultimate stress words were reintroduced into the Portuguese lexicon (cf. de Vasconcelos, 1956, p. 62), reviving the covariation between antepenultimate and penultimate stress words (e.g.: óculos vs. oclos; aurículo vs. orelha).

This lexical variation followed two distinct paths from Latin to Portuguese: a) lexicalization of the penultimate stress word, as in: speculum > speclum > espelho; calidus > calmus > calmo; apicula > apicla > abelha; b) historical variation still under way, as in: século ~ seclo (Latin: saeculum ~ saeclum); ângulo ~ anglo (Latin: angulus ~ anglus); óculos ~ oclos (Latin: oculus ~ oclus).

Analysis based upon mainstream linguistics considered that in this variation there was a suppression (cf. Amaral, 2002, p. 102), a loss (cf. Quednau, 2002, p.79) or a fall (cf. Williams, 1961, p. 66) of the medial post-stressed vowel. Due to this fact, penultimate stress words can be represented in informal texts as "abobra (for abóbora), cosca (for cócega), anális (for análise)". It is worth pointing out, however, that these authors worked with linguistic theories which favor the speaker's linguistic intuition, not taking into consideration phonetic details in their analyses. Yet, it will be demonstrated here, within the Articulatory Phonology (henceforth AP) framework ( Browman and Goldstein, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992), that what really happens is not the "loss" of a phoneme-sized segment, but a reduction of magnitude of the gestures composing either the medial post-stressed or the final post-stressed vowel. In other words, what happens in such cases is an acoustic-articulatory reduction of gestures, which may be perceived/reinterpreted as a transitional gesture of the surrounding gestures.

Before presenting a pilot study on the acoustics of lexical variation and the findings of an articulatory study, a brief revision of how the AP framework deals with lexical variation will be shown in the next section.

2 Lexical variation in the Articulatory Phonology

In AP there is no dichotomy between phonetic and phonological level and the minimal unit of research is the articulatory gesture, defined abstractly by the task dynamics model ( Kelso et al., 1986). This phonological model proposes some principles of magnitude and temporal change to account for linguistic phenomena such as coarticulation, allophonic variation and several subsegmental phenomena in language acquisition and speech pathology.

Besides, gestures have a temporal and spatial scope (cf. ), suggesting that they do not disappear (or appear) in syllabic restructurings, i.e., they are always present and the sensation of loss (or insertion) of a segment is due to: (i) a magnitude reduction (or increase) of a certain gesture (vide Albano, 2001, for a gestural explanation of the "epenthetic" vowel in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP), as in "paiz" (for "paz"), caused by a constriction gesture delay in sequences of vowel followed by /s/ in word final position); (ii) an increase (or reduction) of gestural overlap, such as in the increase of gestural overlap for the word "para" (), which will be similar to the gestural organization in the beginning of "prata" (). It can be inferred from that the overlap between the tongue body and tongue tip gestures can cause a change from "para" to "pra", which is the usual pronunciation of this preposition in many BP dialects. These changes in gestural magnitude, as will be shown here, seem to be conditioned by social, psychological, individual and phonetic factors, which can be elicited by speech rate variation. Therefore, following Byrd (2003), "the postulation of abstract, dynamically-specified, and underlying stable phonological units, constrains the possibilities for accounting for variability in word forms".

In the next sections, it will be shown how AP deals with the variation between antepenultimate stress and penultimate stress words in BP and how it explains the change of a lexical item into another one. This is a novel approach in BP studies. As far as is known, no previous articulatory studies have been conducted with BP data. Because of this, this research intends to inaugurate a new methodological approach for analyzing BP data. In order to do so, firstly it will be presented some results of a previous acoustic study and, then, an articulatory study based on the AP framework, which can explain lexical variation in BP.

3 Previous acoustic study

Most of the researchers who have shown the influence of speech rate upon lexical realizations in BP have used qualitative analyses instead of quantitative ones ( Abaurre-Gnerre, 1979, 1981; Meireles, 2001). This paper's analyses (acoustic and articulatory) will demonstrate how AP, based upon the dynamical systems theory ( Kelso, 1995; Port and van Gelder, 1995), efficiently explains the speech rate influence upon a classical process of variation and change in Portuguese: variation/change of antepenultimate stress words into penultimate ones. As seen in the introduction, this process began in the change from Classical Latin to Vulgar Latin and from this to Portuguese (e.g. "apicula > apicla > abelha"; "teneru > tenru > tenro") and continues until today's lexical variations (e.g. "córrego ~ corgo"; "fósforo ~ fosfro"; "música ~ musca").

In order to show this speech rate influence upon lexical processes, Meireles and Barbosa (submitted) have carried out an acoustic study. In this study, two male and two female Brazilian speakers from the Mineiro dialect (from Minas Gerais state) and two male and two female Brazilian speakers from the Paulista dialect (from São Paulo state), aged between 20 and 30 years, with no apparent phonatory, neurological or mental problems, read the words "abóbora, análise, cócega, fôlego, fósforo, and sábado" in a sound-treated room. These words were inserted in the carrier sentence: "Digo _ _ _ _ _ baixinho" ((I) say _ _ _ _ _ quietly) and recorded at three distinct speech rates. To obtain these three distinct speech rates, the subject was asked to read the sentences according to the following instructions and order: (1) normal: speak in a comfortable way; (2) slow: speak as slowly as you can preserving the sentence's intelligibility and without introducing pauses between words; (3) fast: speak as fast as you can without introducing distortions in speech. Some additional utterances were also given as prompts to the subjects exemplifying each one of the intended speech rates. Also, before the recording session, the subjects practiced the elicitation of different speech rates until they were comfortable with the task.

Acoustic analyses were conducted through normalization of syllable-sized durations by means of z-score computing, according to Barbosa's guidelines ( Barbosa, 2006). Results have shown inter-speaker (F (7,40) = 27.3, p < 10 −5), inter-dialect (F (1,70) = 25.3, p < 10 −5, with Mineiro speakers on average faster than Paulista ones), and inter-gender (F(1,142) = 6.8, p < 0.01, with male speakers faster than female ones, result already found in American English by Byrd, 1994, p. 43) differences. It was also found that faster speakers produced more penultimate stress words than slower ones. Two other main results could explain this historical lexical change: 1) distinct reductions according to medial vowel resistance to reduction; 2) a tendency to reducing more extremely as speech rate increases.

Regarding the first main result, it has been studied if the medial post-stressed vowel reduces more than the final post-stressed one, for all words in the corpus, which could explain why in this historical lexical process there is, most of the times, a perception of "loss" of the medial post-stressed vowel. Nevertheless, a one-way ANOVA did not reveal any differences between the duration of the medial post-stressed (henceforth MPS) and final post-stressed (hence-forth FPS) vowels, all words, speakers and rates considered. Thus, no general pattern of reduction was found. However, separate ANOVAs per class of word revealed two different patterns of reduction: 1) MPS vowel reduces more than the FPS one in the words abóbora, cócega, and fósforo (F(2,1106)=516.92, p < 10 −4); 2) FPS vowel reduces more than the MPS one in the words análise, fôlego, and sábado (F(2,1055)=672,69, p < 10 −4). Interestingly, such results could explain why "abóbora, cócega, fósforo" covary with the syncopated forms "abobra, cosca, fosfro", and why "análise" covary with "anális/análiz" in BP.

As regards the second main result, dynamical aspects of the variation between antepenultimate stress and penultimate stress words were revealed. In order to do so, a Friedman non-parametric ANOVA was run taking as dependent variable the duration decreasing rate of the vowels in different stress conditions as a function of rate, all speakers and words considered. Duration decreasing rate measures how each vowel in different stress conditions percentually decreases from normal (N) to fast (F) rates, through the following equation: (F-N)/N.100%. Results have shown a significant difference between MPS vowel and FPS one (p < 0.014, effective α = 0.017), as shown by the percentual decreasing means of the vowels in bold (MPS, FPS): abób or a (54,22), anál is e (48,38), cóc eg a (39,13), fôl eg o (2,7), fósf or o (5,2), and sáb ad o (10,9). These results also show a differentiation in the reduction degrees of the MPS vowel, since "fôlego, sábado" were the words which less reduced their MPS vowels. This result corroborates the previous one revealing two statistically distinct groups according to: 1) reduction of the MPS vowel: abóbora, cócega, and fósforo; 2) reduction of the FPS vowel: análise, fôlego, and sábado. Moreover, it has also been shown how dynamical aspects influenced by speech rate increase could be related to the lexical process of variation from antepenultimate stress words into penultimate ones.

Meireles and Barbosa (submitted) have speculated how gestures would change with speech rate increase. In this work the authors have stated that gestures do not appear (or disappear) in Portuguese phonological processes. They are always present. What really happens is a reduction of the magnitude degree of a gesture or a gestural overlap, which leads to lexical variation, and that can even constitute a linguistic change in a future time. In order to experimentally evaluate these statements the following articulatory experiment was run.

4 Articulatory study

The main objective of this research was to observe the coarticulation between the MPS vowel and the surrounding consonants. In order to do so, a female native speaker of BP (30 years old) was recorded acoustically (sampling rate: 20.05 kHz) and articulatorily at USC Phonetics Laboratory. The reasons why only one speaker was used in the experiment are: a) the time consuming task of analyzing articulatory data: this point is described in the next subsection; b) the study's novelty in Brazilian Portuguese studies: there is not any previous study with articulatory data in this language, which makes the task harder to accomplish than usual. In other words, there is no previous information that could be relied on to make the articulatory analysis; c) acoustic data already measured in previous studies: despite of the unavailability of articulatory data for Brazilian Portuguese, the acoustic studies on the subject of variation/change between antepenultimate and penultimate stress words (cf. previous section) provide solid background to support the future articulatory results.

The corpus consisted of the following utterances: "a víbora, abóbora, a bêbada, abóbada". These sentences were designed so as to have labial consonants ([v] or [b]) for the two first consonants and an alveolar consonant for the final one ([ɾ] or [d]). This articulatory pattern was chosen in order to facilitate the future analyses. As it was going to be studied the coarticulation between the MPS vowel and the surrounding consonants, the articulatory distance between the bilabial consonant and the alveolar consonant could be easily measured (see in the next subsection). The article "a" [the] was introduced for some words, so as to have four syllables in all utterances. Besides, two more words preceded by an article were used: "o fósforo" and "o sábado". These utterances in spite of not following this study's articulatory pattern were chosen because of having being used in the acoustic study described in the previous section.

The subject read the utterances at three distinct speech rates in the carrier sentence "Digas _ _ _ _ _ baixinho". Ten repetitions of each sentence (randomized within blocks) at three speech rates were recorded, resulting in a total of 180 utterances for analysis (6 sentences × 10 repetitions × 3 speech rates). As in the acoustic study described earlier, the speech rates were obtained according to the following instructions and order: (1) normal: speak in a comfortable way; (2) slow: speak as slowly as you can preserving the sentence's meaning and without introducing pauses between words; (3) fast: speak as fast as you can without introducing distortions in speech. Some utterances were also given as prompts to the subject exemplifying each one of the intended speech rates.

4.1 Speech analysis

Before recording, the subject was informed of the rules for running an articulatory experiment. After the subject's acceptance of the terms, she was paid for her participation, and signed an approved informed consent form explaining the purpose of the experiment. Then, she was told to read the experiment instructions and afterwards, as a short training, to read some sentences from a previous acoustic experiment at three distinct speech rates. After training, a professional dentist positioned the sensors at the places described below. As usual in EMMA data acquisition's experiments, in a first moment, the subject felt a little uncomfortable to talking with sensors inside the mouth. Nevertheless, it is important to remark that her uncomfortableness is only related to the fact of being afraid of loosing the sensor's placement, as reported by her. Then, she was encouraged to speak in her usual way and not to be troubled by the sensors. She was told they would not come off easily, and if they did, the dentist would be there to arrange them again. After that, she practiced some extra sentences until she felt comfortable speaking with the sensors. Finally, once she was ready for the recording session, the experiment was run. Also, no artificiality was observed in her speech during the session.

A 2-D Articulograph AG-200 ( www.articulograph.de) (cf. Perkell et al., 1992, EMMA magnetometer system) was used for tracking jaw movement. The movement data was sampled at 200 Hz, head-corrected, rotated to the occlusal plane, and low-pass filtered at 25 Hz. Pellets were attached to the following articulators: tongue tip (TT), tongue body (TB), upper lips (UL), lower lips (LL), and jaw (at the lower incisors). Two other pellets were used as reference for the signal acquisition system: one at the nose bridge, and one at the center anterior surface of the maxillary incisors.

For transcription and labeling, MAVIS software ( Tiede et al., 1999), modified at University of Southern California, was employed to measure the lower lip and tongue tip sensor movements in the vertical dimension (y-axis) (cf. and ). It is important to emphasize at this point that articulatory analyses are very time consuming, since the raw articulatory data obtained via EMMA have to be manually prepared so as to be used in MAVIS. It means that the 180 sentences have to be manually converted one by one, in order to be ready for analysis (see Meireles, 2007, for a detailed description). Even so, it is necessary after this process to manually adjust the articulatory parameters sentence by sentence in MAVIS, so as to begin to measure the intended articulatory distances. Recall that articulatory data are multidimensional, i.e., information are displayed in the×and y axes, as well as in a tangential axis. Besides, information about gesture's velocity and acceleration in all axes are displayed together in MAVIS.

The following articulatory parameters were marked in the signal: (i) lower lip maximum constriction (see : 'x' is an example of such a lower lip maximum constriction): measured at y-velocity zero-crossing at maximum closing; (ii) lower lip minimum constriction (see : the extreme right of the arrow in 'w' is an example of such a lower lip minimum constriction): measured at y-velocity zero-crossing at maximum opening; and (iii) tongue tip maximum constriction (see : 'z' is an example of such a tongue tip maximum constriction): measured at y-velocity zero-crossing at maximum closing.

To measure the coarticulation degree in the recorded words, the articulatory distance between the post-stressed consonants (bold type) was used, namely: abó bo ra, abó ba da, ví bo ra, bê bad a, fós fo ro, and sá ba d o. As each one of these bold consonants were either labial or alveolar, this measure was made from zero y-velocity (LL) to zero y-velocity (TT), as shown in below. It is shown in this figure: (i) curved lines representing the gesture's movement in the oral cavity; (ii) 'Zon' representing zero velocity onset, i.e., the moment in time where the gesture is changing direction; (iii) 'Pon' representing the gesture's peak velocity onset, i.e., the moment in time where the gesture's velocity is maximally positive; and (iv) 'Von' representing the gesture's valley velocity onset, i.e., the moment in time where the gesture's velocity is maximally negative.

The articulatory interval between the beginning and the end of the target-word was also measured, as shown in below. As in , it is shown in : (i) curved lines representing the gesture's movement in the oral cavity; (ii) 'Zon' representing zero velocity onset; (iii) 'Pon' representing the gesture's peak velocity onset; and (iv) 'Von' representing the gesture's valley velocity onset. This word-related measure was crucial to analyze if distinct speech rates have really been pronounced by the speaker.

One can argue there is no scale information on the 'y' axis. This is due to the fact that in MAVIS this information is only displayed in another window called SPATIAL (see ). This picture represents information about the gesture displacement in millimeters on the 'x' and 'y' axes. 'x' represents the gesture's movement on the horizontal axis and 'y' represents the gesture's movement on the vertical axis. This is the scale that unfortunately is not represented in the main MAVIS window and, because of this, it is not present on and .

A one-way ANOVA with word articulatory duration as a function of rate indicates that three distinct rates were obtained (see ). Each word was individually considered (e.g. word duration of "abóbora" as a function of rate). Besides, there was a gradual duration decrease with speech rate increase, statistically corroborated through a Scheffé post-hoc test. In other words, it was found a continuous duration decrease from slow to normal rates, and from normal to fast rates for all words.

Having been confirmed three distinct speech rates, an investigation of the coarticulation degree between post-stressed consonants was started. It was considered that a shorter articulatory consonantal distance would represent a greater coarticulation degree between these consonants and the related surrounded vowel. The hypothesis adopted was that such coarticulation degree gradually increases with speech rate increase. In order to verify this hypothesis, a one-way ANOVA with the articulatory duration of the consonantal interval as a function of rate was run. As before, all words were individually considered. Statistical results are represented in .

shows that there is really a coarticulation degree increase with speech rate increase in the post-stressed gestures, i.e., post-stressed consonants are closer to each other. Besides, a post-hoc Scheffé analysis reveals that, except for "fósforo", all words behave distinctly across rates, i.e., their consonantal interval duration was smaller with speech rate increase. This coarticulation increase is reinforced taking the consonantal duration of all words together as a function of rate (F(2,173) = 168.52, p < 10 −4). One may argue, however, that this is an obvious result, since speech rate increase should cause a gradual gestural duration decrease. Nevertheless, and show that such decrease is not linear, word's duration reduced differently from the consonantal interval's duration. This result suggests that a duration differentiation in the consonantal interval of the words could be possible. In other words, their post-stressed consonantal interval duration could be different according to the word internal structure. Recall that in Brazilian Portuguese not all antepenultimate stress words covary with penultimate stress ones. This variation depends on the word internal structure. To verify this question, a one-way ANOVA with duration of the consonantal interval as a function of the individual words was run, all rates considered. Yet, statistical results did not show any differentiation.

In order to look for articulatory differences related to certain consonantal intervals and word structure, which could shed new light on the covariation between antepenultimate and penultimate stress words in Brazilian Portuguese, a new measure called proportional consonantal interval was investigated. This interval shows how consonants percentually decrease within words as a function of speech rate increase and is measured through the following formula: PCI = CI/WD, in which PCI refers to the proportional consonantal interval, CI to the consonantal interval, and WD to the word duration. For instance, if a CI duration is 195.5 ms and a WD is 431 ms, PCI is 45%, i.e., this interval extends over 45% of the total word duration.

The experimental hypothesis was that the PCI reduces (extends over a short part of the word) with speech rate increase. To investigate this hypothesis, a Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA with PCI as a function of rate was run, all words individually considered. Results are displayed in below.

reveals that, proportionally to the word reduction, there was no speech rate effect upon PCI for most of the words (four out of six). Even for the words with rate effect ("abóbora" and "fósforo"), there was no distinction among all rates. Multiple (post-hoc) comparisons of average ranks for each pair of groups (corrected for the number of comparisons) have shown that (i) the fast rate in "abóbora" was equal to the normal and slow rates (F = (S & N)), but the slow rate was different from the normal rate (S ≠ N); (ii) the slow rate in "fósforo" was equal to the normal and fast rates (S = (N & F)), but the fast rate was different from the normal rate (F ≠ N). It means no clear PCI pattern can be predicted with speech rate increase. Besides, a Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA of the PCI as a function of rate, all words considered, showed no statistical significance of the PCI with speech rate increase. This data reminds us of Tuller and Kelso's study ( Tuller and Kelso, 1984), in which, searching for linguistic invariance, it was found that the relative intersegmental temporal organization is maintained when the suprasegmental structure is varied. The same seems to be the case here, since, even though it has been found that the duration of the consonantal interval decreases with speech rate increase, this interval was constant regarding the total word duration (PCI). In other words, PCI has proportionally reduced as a function of the target-word duration decrease.

As no general influence of speech rate upon PCI was found, it has been investigated whether there was influence of the word type on PCI. In order to do so, a Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA with PCI as a function of the word type was run, all rates considered. Results show that the word factor is relevant for the PCI attribution (H(5,N=176) = 104.6431, p < 10 −3). Besides, multiple (post-hoc) comparisons of average ranks for each pair of groups (corrected for the number of comparisons) divided the words into three distinct groups. shows these groups with its PCI's mean and standard deviation, as follows: a) group 1: víbora; b) group 2: bêbada, abóbora, fósforo, and sábado; and c) group 3: abóbada. Recall that a higher PCI implies that the CI is less vulnerable to speech rate variation, i.e., it presents less coarticulation. Thus, the words in group 1 would be produced with less coarticulation than the ones in groups 2 and 3, consecutively. This result partly explains why in casual speech there is not a lexical form like "vibra" (for "víbora") and, on the other side, there are lexical forms such as "abobra", "fosfro", and "sabo" (for "sábado"). Nevertheless, these results are not clear to explain why "abóbada" is the word with the smallest PCI. If, on one side, this small value can be explained by the greater compression of the consonant [d] in relation to [ɾ], on the other side, in casual speech there is no penultimate stress form for "abóbada". Therefore, results suggest that there must other factors acting in the variation from antepenultimate stress into penultimate stress words (such as lexical frequency, for example), since exclusively articulatory data were not capable of completely explaining the lexical variation found in our corpus.

5 Discussion

The results of this paper, through the observation of the increase in coarticulation with speech rate, present acoustic and articulatory evidence to explain the variation from antepenultimate stress words to penultimate stress words in Brazilian Portuguese. These results show that phonetic details are extremely important if we want to correctly interpret linguistic data on lexical variation. The novelty of our approach is to make use of the AP framework for analyzing Portuguese data on linguistic variation. To the best of our knowledge, linguists who study lexical change/variation in this language have always used assumptions based on mainstream linguistics (although with criticism) and, because of that, do not pay close attention to phonetic details in their analysis. On the other side, the use of AP assumptions would greatly contribute to the study of linguistic change/variation, since it incorporates articulatory-phonetic information on a phonological theory of language, breaking up the traditional necessary division between phonetic and phonological data. Thus, such a new approach has been shown useful in sociophonetics issues and has been used in the study of lexical variation in some languages (see for instance Browman and Goldstein, 1990, who introduces the question; McMahon, 2000, who criticizes mainstream linguistics and suggests the incorporation of AP in Lexical Phonology; and Bradley, 2004, who applies AP to the study of Spanish Phonology). Likewise, the application of AP to dialectal variation in Portuguese (and other languages as well) seems to be a profitable area for linguistic studies. Our results also support the idea of language as part of a dynamical system (cf. Elman, 1995; Kelso et al., 1986; Meireles, 2007). In the program of research of the dynamical systems, language's underlying representations emerge from the systemic tendency of non-equilibrium open systems to form stable patterns. In other words, grammar emerges from the brain's physical components (see Elman, 1995, for a neural network demonstration of this process). Therefore, in this linguistic approach both phonetic and phonological aspects of language are interrelated and interdependent. Besides, time is elegantly described at the phonological (abstract) level and no ad hoc rules are necessary.

The question of the relevance of time in linguistic studies was demonstrated here through the covariation between antepenultimate and penultimate stress words in BP. Results have shown that gestures' durational characteristics are extremely important for a perceptual interpretation of antepenultimate stress words as penultimate ones. For example, a short [o] in "abóbora" [abɔboɾɐ] at fast rates may result in the perception of this word as a penultimate stress one. Recall that in AP gestures do not disappear (or appear) in linguistic representations. They are always present in linguistic forms, but in a reduced form. Thereby, we should be careful in analyzing antepenultimate stress words as penultimate stress ones without any acoustic or articulatory measurements to corroborate our statements, as has been made in the literature (see for example Amaral, 2002, who have used a qualitative analysis to evaluate the status of antepenultimate stress words as penultimate ones). In this specific case, the lack of quantitative analysis may lead to wrong interpretation of the data.

Obviously, there are also lexical forms that are clearly perceptually penultimate stress words, as the words "sabo" (for "sábado"), "estombo" (for "estômago"), and "meco" (for "médico"). Nevertheless, such extreme transformations of the pattern lexical item are socially or regionally marked. They occur either in low class or in rural communities in Brazil and, in our point of view, they are lexicalized as such in these dialects. On the other side, there are words that covary for all Brazilian Portuguese dialects, such as "abóbora" ~ "abóbra", and "fósforo" ~ "fósfro". In these cases quantitative analysis should be made in order to evaluate the lexical status of these words as antepenultimate or penultimate stress ones. It is worth remembering that, as shown here, speech rate seems to have a crucial effect on this lexical categorization.

Because this study describes the consequences of speech rate increase at the word level, the results benefit areas in speech technology directly concerned with speech variability. These include speech synthesis systems for which phonetic variability is not directly considered by pre-recorded material; possibly for helping to deal with pronunciation dictionaries and language models in automatic speech recognition systems. Moreover, once the variability of BP gestures due to speech rate increase is well-known, articulatory synthesis of BP gestures could be made from this knowledge, in order to realistically represent the movement of articulatory gestures in spoken Portuguese. This is a potential topic for future research.

6 Conclusion

The results of this articulatory study suggest that speech rate increase acts to reduce the magnitude of a gesture, by increasing gestural overlap, which causes the covariation between antepenultimate and penultimate stress words in Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, disregarding other factors, speech rate increase may lead to a linguistic change at a future time. Results also show that the coarticulation degree of the post-stressed consonants increases with speech rate increase, i.e., these consonants are closer to each other at fast rates, which may result in the perception of the in-between vowel as inexistent. Besides, it was found that a coefficient called proportional consonantal interval (PCI) is influenced by word type. Using such a measure three groups were statistically found, from lesser to greater reduction: a) group 1: víbora; b) group 2: bêbada, abóbora, fósforo, and sábado; and c) group 3: abóbada. Nevertheless, future studies are needed to explain this lexical variation in Brazilian Portuguese, since other factors, such as lexical frequency, may affect this process. This factor may explain why the word "abóbada" (greater coefficient of consonantal reduction, low frequency) does not have a contracted form in casual speech. Furthermore, the new methodological approach presented here benefits areas in speech technology directly concerned with speech variability.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the following grants: CAPES, CNPq (200199/2004-8), Fapesp (03/09199-2), and NIH (DC03172). The authors thank Marco Antônio de Oliveira, Tânia Alckmim, Maria Bernadete Marques Abaurre, and Louis Goldstein for their insightful comments on this research. Many thanks are due to USC Phonetics Laboratory, Dani Byrd and Sungbok Lee, for help with the articulatory design and their support, and James Mah, for help with the articulatory recordings.

Footnotes

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¹ In this case there is no syncope, but apocope, which is the loss of a sound at the end of a word.

References

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lexical reorganization in Brazilian Portuguese: an articulatory study

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This work, which is couched in the theoretical framework of Articulatory Phonology, deals with the influence of speech rate on the change/variation from antepenultimate stress words into penultimate stress words in Brazilian Portuguese. Both acoustic and articulatory (EMMA) studies were conducted. On the acoustic side, results show different patterns of post-stressed vowel reduction according to the word type.

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Este artigo fala da diversidade linguística que existe no mundo. Fala sobre o medo que alguns lenguages nao existam no futuro y como com o tempo diferentes linguas (como portugues) sao intoducidas a diferentes regiones.

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1. LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY Statistics on living languages present different indicators but point, in general, to a grand total of more than 6000 languages in the world. According to the latest figures released by UNESCO, this number exceeds 6700.
The distribution of living languages by geographic areas reveals, firstly, that Europe has the lowest number of idioms - 225 which corresponds to a mere 3,4% of the total - nevertheless, paradoxically, it is the continent where concerns over their preservation have arisen with greater emphasis. Secondly, the statistics show that the majority of languages are concentrated in developing countries in the continents of Asia (32%) and Africa (30%).

This great linguistic diversity hides, nevertheless, an enormous disparity between idioms, incorporating everything from those with about 900 million speakers to others that are limited to fewer than 20 individuals. According to recent calculations, 600 languages have more than 100 000 speakers, while 500 others are confined to less than 100 speakers.

Many African, Asian and American languages are at risk of extinction, with recent estimations stating that 25 languages disappear annually, in other words, at a rate of one every two weeks.

An analysis of the factors which constitute a threat to the existence of a language shows a strong correlation between geographic location (predominantly in Asia and Africa), the stage of development of the particular country and the minority status of numerous communities in contrast to the powerful official languages. Take as an example those states that encompass more than 200 languages: Papua-New Guinea (850), Indonesia (670), Nigeria (410), India (380), Cameroon (270), Mexico (240) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (210) (1).

With the disappearance of a language it is not only a human being who dies, but also a form of expressing a conception of the world, a means of expressing a relationship with nature, an oral tradition, a poetry, and ultimately a culture, thereby contributing to the global impoverishment of humanity.

Therefore states, regions, societies and civic and cultural organisation have sought, with the assistance of international organisations, to adopt measures conducive to the preservation of languages, as these constitute a priceless heritage, fulfilling a central role in the preservation of the identity of numerous communities threatened on diverse continents, as well as being indispensable factors in guaranteeing cultural diversity.

Portugal has recently taken steps in this regard. The country officially recognised the Mirandesa language (spoken in the north eastern part of Portugal and adjacent areas in Spain) in 1999, legislated its teaching in the education system and played a leading role, and through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in promoting the signing of the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages, approved in 1992 by the European Council.

2. MOTHER TONGUES

A number of warnings by linguists and other social scientists, as well as international organisations and civil servants from different parts of the world, have come to underline, with growing intensity, the crucial factor of mother tongues in the development of human creativity, of capacity to communicate, of the elaboration of concepts and, above all, its primary role in cultural identity. These concerns were mirrored in and gave rise to the Universal Declaration on Language Rights, approved in Barcelona on 6 June 1996 during the World Conference on Language Rights.

As a definitive means of contributing to the preservation of cultural diversity and protection of the intangible heritage of humanity, the 30th General Assembly of UNESCO, which took place in 1999, decided to celebrate International Mother Tongue day on the 21st of February every year.

The first of these celebrations took place in the year 2000 with, on this occasion, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, saying that in this era of globalisation, in which some languages are transformed into global languages, it is fundamental that the local is preserved. Koichiro Matsuura, the Director General of Unesco, accentuated the fundamental importance and durability of the mother tongue which "fed, from the tenderest age of infancy, the most intimate thoughts".

The Portuguese language occupied, until the beginning of the 20th Century, a relatively modest position among the most important mother tongues in the world. It was only from the first decades of the 1900s that it began to acquire significant reach, an evolution which has been progressively accentuated.

Estimates released in 1999 (www.sil.org/ ethnologue/top100.html) regarding the 100 most spoken mother tongues in the world placed Portuguese in sixth place, attributing to it a total of about 170 million speakers. The statistics verified that among the ten mother tongues most widely spoken on the planet, Portuguese was only superseded by Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, and occupied the position of third most widely spoken European language, while it had a number of speakers identical to that of Russian.

A interpolation of these facts with principles of geography and demographics permit the conclusion that only the three most important European mother tongues at the global level - Spanish, English and Portuguese - maintain the highest number of speakers in individual countries outside of their original areas, all of which are situated on the American continent, namely Mexico, the United States of America and Brazil, respectively. On the other hand, the three most important eastern languages do not possess the status of mother tongue in states situated on other continents. The European languages referred to have found, therefore, in the former colonies of the Americas powerful vehicles for their global expansion, largely outstripping that of the former metropoles.
The publication of the figures relating to 2000, by virtue of the corrections introduced relative to previous calculations, places Hindi as the second most widely spoken mother tongue, and confirms the significant tendencies of the growth of Spanish, English, Bengali and Portuguese. It is pleasing to note that our language maintains its sixth position while Russian - which is credited with the same number of speakers - registers an inversion in its growth tendency thanks to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a historic event which, from a linguistic point of view, caused modifications that will be far more visible in decades to come.

Despite the latest estimates of Ethnologue.Languages of the World bearing a significant approximation of reality as far as Portuguese is concerned, there is still a statistical underestimation. According to figures derived from institutions responsible for the census of the populations of the countries whose official language is Portuguese we can, while erring on the side of caution as a means of reducing the margin of error, point to a figure of 183 million people whose mother tongue is Portuguese, distributed, by decreasing order of importance, on the continents of America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Preliminary results from the population census for 2000, released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (www.ibge.gov.br) estimate that the population of Brazil is 170 million inhabitants, recording an annual expected growth rate of 1,93. The total figure ought to be reduced by 320 000 Native Americans who have mother tongues belonging to diverse American linguistic families and, at most, one million immigrants who actually do not have the language of Machado de Assis as their mother tongue.
The population of Portugal had reached 10 023 070 inhabitants by the end of last year, according to figures made available by the National Statistics Institute (2). For the first time in the past fifteen years, therefore, the level of 10 million residents has been exceeded, a fact due not only to an increase in births and decrease in deaths - the annual growth rate is at 1,2 - but is also contributed to by immigration. It is estimated that of all of Portugal's residents 300 000, at most, do not have Portuguese as their mother tongue.

The Second General Census of the Population and Habitation of Mozambique, undertaken in 1997 (www.ine.gov.mz/censo2/00/brochura/00linguas.htm) reveals that of a total of 12 536 800 inhabitants of age 5 and above, 6,5% have Portuguese as their mother tongue, representing 814 892 individuals. It is worth noting that there is a significant difference when dissecting the total figure between rural and urban areas, as in the first category this percentage falls to 2,0%, while for the second it increases to 17%. Therefore, a large majority of Mozambican citizens who have the Portuguese language as their mother tongue live in cities. This fact is exemplified by the testimony of a young Mozambican writer, Nelson Saúte, who recently affirmed that "my mother tongue is Portuguese. Yet the language of my mother, actually , is Ronga and that of my father is Bitonga. These I understand and speak". (3)

Angola is the African country where the Portuguese language is found more vigorously entrenched. Calculations conducted by Angolan academics suggest that Portuguese constitutes the mother tongue of 40% of the population, estimated at 12 million inhabitants. It is not possible, however, to corroborate these numbers statistically, by virtue of the large numbers of displaced people and internal refugees affected by the conflict which afflicts the country. Even reducing these estimates by half - as a matter of prudence - it represents, at least, 2 million Angolans who have "the final flower of Lacio" as their mother tongue.
Portuguese speaking residents in other parts of the world - 4 631 482 according to a 1997 estimate (4) - contribute significantly to the expansion of the language of Camoens in various parts of the world, with particular prominence in the United States of America, Canada, France, Venezuela, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg. It is also worth noting that fact that from the 1980s Brazil came to experience, for the first time in its history, the phenomenon of emigration. The number of Brazilians living in other countries has presently reached 1 374 000, with the following distribution: 970 000 in North America, 250 000 in Asia, principally concentrated in Japan, and 127 000 in Europe. It is certainly true that a percentage of people of Portuguese descent do not have Portuguese as their mother tongue, because of which the figures should be treated circumspectly, nevertheless the joint contribution of Portuguese and Brazilian emigrants probably exceeds, at least 3 million people.

The figures calculated allow the arrival at the firm conclusion that fault can easily be found with the estimates put forward, even more so because account has not been made of the contributions of three countries where Portuguese is the official language (Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe) or of territories such as East Timor and Macau. The improvement of national statistical systems in the countries where Portuguese is the official language will allow the possibility of applying greater rigor to the calculation of the number of people for whom Portuguese is their mother tongue.

The Portuguese language finds itself, therefore, particularly well positioned in the context of the linguistic dispute being conducted on the international stage, as it is one of those rare idioms that has the status of being the mother tongue in states or territories on four continents.

3. GLOBAL LANGUAGE
Portuguese is actually the sixth most widely spoken mother tongue on a global level, it is an official language in seven countries on three continents - and, within the short term, of eight countries in four continents - it is the working language of twelve international organisations, and is used daily by about 200 million human beings.

The important position which Portuguese actually occupies in the global linguistic panorama does not result, albeit, from the implementation of a strategic programme which envisioned the attainment of this objective, as Portugal did not associate a policy of 'lusophonisation' with its process of expansion, unlike the options adopted by other European powers.

Portuguese was spread spontaneously by navigators, soldiers, merchants, seamen and missionaries who, from the 15th century, covered the four corners of the globe, from Ceuta (the northern point of Africa opposite Gibraltar) to Japan.

The lack of union of some bond between the project of creation of an empire and a respective linguistic component conferred on the process of the expansion of the Portuguese language a type of dissemination which is behind the origin of the appearance of diverse creoles in Africa, Asia and America.

An analysis of estimates of the number of speakers of the eight principal European languages - from the 16th century to the close of the 20th century - shows that Portuguese barely began to gain prominence in the last century. Until 1900 Portuguese was almost always placed in eighth position, with the exception of 1700 in which it reached seventh position (4 million). Only in 1935 did the idiom of Camoens begin a sustained process of growth, reaching sixth position (47 million) and definitively surpassing Polish and Italian. In 1992, according to estimates by the demographers Jean-Claude Chasteland and Jean-Claude Chesnais, Portuguese rose to fourth position, with 160 million speakers, as a result of a dovetailing of factors such as the demographic growth in Brazil and Portugal and the development of literacy programmes in African countries where the official language is Portuguese (known as PALOP in the Portuguese acronym).

In the past few years, the consolidation of significant geopolitical mutations which occurred in Europe, South America and Southern Africa have had particular repercussions in the field of language usage. On the European continent the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union provoked, in many states of Central and Eastern Europe, a drastic reduction in the teaching of Russian in their respective systems of education. The development of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which began life in 1980 and integrates the majority of the southern hemisphere African countries, adopted Portuguese and English as the two official languages of the region. Finally, in South America the creation, in 1991, of MERCOSUL caused a significant alteration in the range of teaching of foreign languages, conferring on Portuguese and Spanish the mantle of obligatory idioms in the countries of the regional grouping.

It is in the light of the new realm of international relations in which we find ourselves in the final period of the cold war that the phenomena of regional integration, which is intensifying on four continents, stands out with particular prominence, such that we are able to analyse the prospects for the evolution of the Portuguese language in a global context.

Taking as a starting point the intersection of figures provided by regional organisations in which Portuguese assumes the function of one of the official languages, together with demographic projections by the United Nations to 2050, we arrive at the conclusion that our language has major possibilities for growth, as a language of international communication, both in Southern Africa and South America.
3.1. SOUTHERN AFRICA
The PALOP constitute a foundation of major importance for the expansion of Portuguese in Africa. The option for the language of Camoens was taken by the nationalist movements during the course of the struggle for liberation and resulted in the recognition that its use went easily in tandem with the consolidation of political and cultural borders of the future states, also contributing to the strengthening of national unity at independence. Naturally this decision was lent some weight by the examples of the contemporary processes of decolonisation taking place in the rest of Africa, but also by the publication, in 1958, of a classic work which emphasised the role of language in the construction of unity in Brazil (5). The founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC in the Portuguese acronym), Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) expressed this line of thought by affirming that "the Portuguese language is one of the best things the Portuguese have left us".

The potential for expansion of our language in Africa is extremely significant, above all in the southern hemisphere. Besides the PALOPs, whose population will increase, according to UN estimates, to 58 million by 2025 and 83 million by 2050, there is a notable growth in requests for teaching of Portuguese at the different levels of education in the countries which make up the SADC, particularly in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe. An identical trend is being seen in the various states of the Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa (UEMOA in the French acronym) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), with special relevance in the cases of Senegal (with more than 10 000 students of Portuguese in secondary and higher education), the Ivory Coast and Gabon.

3.2. SOUTH AMERICA
The recent phenomenon of regional integration which led to the creation of MERCOSUL is contributing suddenly to a reciprocal movement for the teaching of Portuguese and Spanish in the member countries. An association of this new and dynamic element with demographic projections reveals that there is a vast space for an exponential growth in the teaching of Portuguese in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay (MERCOSUL members together with Brazil), together with a total population of 44,5 million people and which will be about 60 million in 2025 and 71 million in 2050.

These possibilities are already in various stages of implementation according to the most recent facts available. In the final quarter of last year, a report in the Argentinian newspaper Clarin made it clear that "Portuguese, the other idiom of the MERCOSUR" was taught in institutions, universities, primary and secondary schools, reaching thousands of Argentinians who are studying it throughout the country.

The teaching of our language is already compulsory in various provinces (Formosa and Santa Fe) and the Secretary of Education in the Municipality of Buenos Aires has initiated a bilingual teaching programme in primary schools in the capital. According to a survey released in February of last year, the Gazeta Mercantil (a newspaper based in Sao Paulo, Brazil) showed that of the total number of 300 language schools in Argentina, Portuguese took second place as most common foreign language, with the same trend occurring in Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as in other Latin American countries which are not MERCOSUL members, such as Chile, Venezuela and Mexico.
3.3. OTHER REGIONS
In August 2000, the National Council of the Timorese CNRT decided to adopt Portuguese as the official language of East Timor, a decision which will bring to eight, in the near future, the number of states whose official language is Portuguese, across four continents.

This was a strategic decision full of symbolism (6), recently confirmed by a government emerging from the first free elections in that territory, which permitted the CPLP (Portuguese acronym for Community of Countries of the Portuguese Language) to count among its members one from the Asian continent.

The concretisation of the project of the leaders of East Timor demands concerted support from among the countries whose official language is Portuguese as a means of reaching, in the medium term, the desired objective.

The creation in Asia of a state whose official language is Portuguese will favour the teaching of Portuguese in diverse countries of the continent, a phenomenon which is already being seen, for example, in Indonesia, the Philippines and in Vietnam, with a parallel growth in the number of students of the language also being registered in Japan, China, andSouth Korea. It has also stimulated interest in our language in Goa, Damao and Diu (all in India), Malaca (Malaysia) and the Special Administrative Region of Macau (China), which are all regions where segments of the population speak Portuguese or creoles with a lexical basis in Portuguese.

The development of economic and cultural relations based on the presence of substantial Portuguese communities has created favourable conditions for the expansion of Portuguese language teaching, be it in the European Union, with particular relevance for France, Spain, Germany and Luxembourg, or be it in North America (United States of America and Canada). In various countries of Central and Eastern Europe a substantial surge in the learning of Portuguese has been noted, especially in secondary schools, with a concentration of cases in Romania, Hungary, Russia and Bulgaria.

The available evidence clearly points to a growth in the adoption of Portuguese in the SADC and MERCOSUL, which trend is being spread into the adjacent countries. "Our Magnificent Portuguese Language" (Nossa Magna Lingua Portuguesa) as Fernando Pessoa put it, therefore shows a great vitality which translates into a notable process of expansion on diverse continents on the eve of the first half of the 21st century.

(1)HAGÈGE, Claude, Haute à la mort des Langues, Paris, Éditions Odile Jacob, 2000. Notes:

(2) Projecções de População Residente 1995-2025.
(3) Interview with Maria Teresa Horta, pub. in Diário de Notícias, nº 48 189, de 28 de Fevereiro de 2001.
(4) MNE/DGACCP/Divisão de Informação e Documentação.
(5) LIMA SOBRINHO, Barbosa, A Língua Portuguesa e a Unidade do Brasil, 2ª ed., Rio de Janeiro, Editora Nova Fronteira, 2000.
(6) HULL, Geoffrey, Timor-Leste. Identidade, Língua e Política Educacional, Lisboa, Instituto Camões, 2001.

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The Portuguese Language: Perspectives for the 21st Century

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1. LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY Statistics on living languages present different indicators but point, in general, to a grand total of more than 6000 languages in the world. According to the latest figures released by UNESCO, this number exceeds 6700.

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Este artigo não fala especificamente da língua portuguesa mas eu acho que é uma boa introdução a este capítulo porque dá uma explicação da diferença entre uma língua é um dialeto. Eu gostei muito porque fala especificamente de os problemas que acontecem quando o governo separa as línguas em categoria baseadas no factores sociales ou politicos nao linguisticamente.

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What's the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the question, linguists like to repeat the grand old observation of the linguist and Yiddishist Max Weinreich, that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

But surely the difference is deeper than a snappy aphorism suggests. The very fact that "language" and "dialect" persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence.

And yet it's hard not to try. An English speaker might be tempted to think, for example, that a language is basically a collection of dialects, where speakers of different dialects within the same language can all understand each other, more or less. Cockney, South African, New Yorkese, Black, Yorkshire-all of these are mutually intelligible variations on a theme. Surely, then, these are "dialects" of some one thing that can be called a "language"? English as a whole, meanwhile, looks like a "language" that stands by itself; there's a clear boundary between it and its closest relative, Frisian, spoken in Northern Europe, which is unintelligible to an English speaker.

As such, English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on "intelligibility": If you can understand it without training, it's a dialect of your own language; if you can't, it's a different language.But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn't apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as "dialects" of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate "languages" are thought of locally as dialects.

I have a Swedish pal I see at conferences in Denmark. When we're out and about there, he is at no linguistic disadvantage. He casually orders food and asks directions in Swedish despite the fact that we are in a different country from his own, where supposedly a different "language"-Danish-is spoken. In fact, I've watched speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian conversing with each other, each in their own native tongues, as a cozy little trio over drinks. A Dane who moves to Sweden does not take Swedish lessons; she adjusts to a variation upon, and not an alternate to, her native speech. The speakers of these varieties of Scandinavian consider them distinct languages because they are spoken in distinct nations, and so be it. However, there is nothing about Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian in themselves that classifies them as "languages"; especially on the page, they resemble each other closely enough to look more like dialects of one "language."
It turns out that it's impossible to determine precisely where one "language" leaves off and another begins.
Meanwhile, one generally hears Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese described as "dialects" of something called Chinese. But the only single "Chinese" language that exists is on paper, in that all of its varieties have the same writing system, where each word has its own symbol that (more or less) stays the same from one Chinese "dialect" to another. Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are more different than Spanish and Italian. I, you, and he in Mandarin are wǒ, nǐ, and tā, but in Cantonese they are, respectively, ngóh, léih, and kéuih. Dialects? A Mandarin-speaker can no more "adjust" to Cantonese than a Swede could "adjust" to German.

There are cases of the Scandinavian and the Chinese kind worldwide. A Moroccan's colloquial "Arabic" is as different from the colloquial "Arabic" of Jordan as Czech is from Polish. In order to understand each other, a Moroccan and a Jordanian would have to communicate in Modern Standard Arabic, a version preserved roughly as it was when the Koran was written. The cultural unity of Arab nations makes the Moroccan and the Jordanian consider themselves to be speaking "kinds of Arabic," whereas speakers of Czech and Polish think of themselves as speaking different languages. But then, while I'm on Czech, there is no such language as "Czechoslovakian"-at least in name. A Czech and a Slovak can usually converse. However, they consider themselves to speak different "languages" because of historical and cultural factors.

It turns out that it's also impossible to determine precisely where one "language" leaves off and another begins.

An example is certain languages-um, dialects?-in Ethiopia. According to data from Sharon Rose of UC San Diego, speakers of Soddo say, for he thatched a roof, kəddənəm. (The upside-down e is pronounced a lot like the oo in foot.) Not far away, people speaking Muher say it starting with kh instead of k: khəddənəm. A further ways distant, people who speak what they call Ezha say it with an r in the place of the n: khəddərəm. In Gyeto, the same word is khətərə. Then in Endegen they start with an h instead of a kh: həttərə. Now, where we started and where we finished look like what one might call different languages: Soddo's kəddənəm and Endegen's həttərə seem about as distinct as French's dimanche and Italian's domenica, for Sunday. But in between Soddo and Endegen are several other stages-I gave only a few of them-that each differ from the previous one by just a little change, such that the speakers can converse. If those stages are "dialects," what are they "dialects" of? Both Soddo and Endegen over on the ends?
The serendipities of history chose one "dialect" as a standard and enshrined it on the page.
All of them are simply dialects-even though the ones on the ends are not mutually intelligible and don't feel like the same "language" to their speakers. Speech worked this way from village to village across Western Europe until recently, when unwritten, rural dialects started steadily disappearing. People now know this area as home to a few "languages" like Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, but on the ground there once was basically a smudge of countless Romance "dialects" shading gradually into one another from Portugal to Italy. In each nation, the serendipities of history chose one "dialect" as a standard and enshrined it on the page, but in real life, the situation was much like in Ethiopia. There are hints of this history today; in Catalan in Spain, key is clau; to the north, in Occitan, it's clau as well; but then a little further north, in obscure rural varieties called Franco-Provençal, it's clâ; in the Romansh of the Swiss mountains it's clav; in the northern Italian variety Piedmontese it's ciav (pronounced "chahv,"); and then in what's known as standard Italian it's chiave (pronounced "KYAH-vay").

The idea of distinguishing "languages" from "dialects" is of no logical use here. As often as not, it's more that speech is a little different from place to place, such that a person can get along speaking when in the town a few valleys over; one starts having trouble the further away he gets; and after a traveling a certain distance can no longer understand a thing anyone is saying.

The only thing that can save an attempt to impose a formal definition on the terms "language" and "dialect" now is perhaps to be found in popular usage, which suggests that languages are written and standardized and have a literature, while dialects are oral, without codified rules, and have no literature. Now, a typical objection to using literature as the dividing line is that there is oral literature-the Iliad and the Odyssey likely originated as memorized poems. But even allowing that memories can retain only so much, and that perhaps it is legitimate to distinguish what Greek bards knew from, say, Russian's written literature, there's another problem.
Is a dialect, on some level, unsophisticated, as if it doesn't have a literature because it is unsuited to extended thought and abstraction?
Namely, it's the implication that there is something lesser about a "dialect." Is a dialect, on some level, unsophisticated, as if it doesn't have a literature because it is unsuited to extended thought and abstraction? I recall an exquisite exchange I once caught between a man whom Nathan Lane could easily play, wearing an ascot and a long scarf and rather plummy of expression, and a man whom Sacha Baron Cohen would be cast as, straight-backed, earnest, and a little wary. Nathan asked Sacha what he spoke. Sacha said "Uzbek." Nathan asked breezily, "Is that a dialect?" Sacha, almost snapping, replied, "No, it is a beautiful language."

Despite Sacha's defensiveness, it's not the case that what one is taught to think of as "dialects" are somehow lowlier or simpler. As often as not, obscure, unwritten "dialects" are much more grammatically complicated than familiar "languages." The Foreign Service Institute ranks what it calls languages in terms of their difficulty for English speakers; the hardest to learn to speak include Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Mongolian, Thai, and Vietnamese. However, just about any Native American, Australian Aboriginal, or indigenous African tongue would easily rank among these in terms of difficulty, and actually, many obscure tongues around the world make any language on the FSI list look like a toy. For example, in Archi, spoken in the Caucasus mountains, a verb can occur in 1,502,839 different forms-that's more than a thousand times more forms than the number of people who even speak it (about 1,200).

Meanwhile, here in the English "language," there are walk, walks, walked, and walking. If sophistication separated languages from dialects, Archi would have more claim to the "language" title than English.

A language, then, is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window. Yes, people can sit down in a room and decide upon a standardized version of a dialect so that large numbers of people can communicate with maximal efficiency-no more clau, clav, and ciav. But standardization doesn't make something "better"-donning a Catholic school uniform isn't "better" than wearing different clothes to school every day.
The world is buzzing with a cacophony of qualitatively equal "dialects," often shading into one another like colors.
Or, yes, the written dialect will have its words collected in dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary does have more words than Archi and Endegen do; the existence of print has allowed English speakers to curate many of their words instead of letting them come and go with time. But words are only part of what makes human speech: You have to know how to put them together, and knowing how to handle Archi's words (or Endegen's) requires its own level of sophistication.

So, what's the difference between a language and a dialect? In popular usage, a language is written in addition to being spoken, while a dialect is just spoken. But in the scientific sense, the world is buzzing with a cacophony of qualitatively equal "dialects," often shading into one another like colors (and often mixing, too), all demonstrating how magnificently complicated human speech can be. If either the terms "language" or "dialect" have any objective use, the best anyone can do is to say that there is no such thing as a "language": Dialects are all there is. "Is it a dialect?" asks Nathan. Properly, Sacha could have answered, "Yes, a beautiful one." And Nathan should have understood that he was speaking a "dialect" too.

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What's the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the question, linguists like to repeat the grand old observation of the linguist and Yiddishist Max Weinreich, that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

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Este artigo foi muito interessante porque dá uma explicação em detalhe de morphologia e como afeta a forma que as línguas são estruturadas. Fala também em detalhe sobre a morphologia na língua portuguesa e dá exemplos de como cambios morfológicos afetam a semântica e a gramatica do portugues.

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Este artigo foi muito interessante porque fala de a unión de o systema ortográfica no português (em geral todas as línguas) e a pronunciação. Fala de como os câmbios em sons, que afeitas os câmbios em pronunciação afetam a gramática da língua e podem causar problemas criando um sistema de gramática universal.

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Este link foi muito interessante para mim porque fala dos câmbios em a língua portuguesa, especificamente em or sons que produce a língua portuguesa. O autor fala sobre a palatalização que acontece no Português Brasileiro, usando exemplos de palavras que tem sido palatalizadas.

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Este link foi muito interessante para mim porque fala dos câmbios em sons que tem acontecido na língua portuguesa. Eu gostei muito deste link porque fala com muito detalhe e usa termos linguísticos para explicar os câmbios.

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Este site te leva a uma página da internet que eu achei foi muito interessante porque fala de gramática no português em uma forma muito technica. Acho que o artigo tem muita boa informação porque ajuda clarificar a forma correcta de construir orações no português.

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Mini-orações livres e dependentes em Português Brasileiro

Universidade Estadual de Campinas

This paper examines free small clauses, which, unlike dependent small clauses, exhibit peculiar properties: (a) they are restricted to occur with individual level and event adjectives, (b) they have to appear with the subject postposed. After considering several hypotheses on the nature of this inversion, it is proposed that these adjectives are of the ergative type, while the stage level adjectives are unergatives. Small clauses with ergative adjectives can be complements of a third copula distinct from the attributive 'ser' and the stative 'estar', which underlies cleft constructions. The derivation of free small clauses is parallel to canonical cleft sentences.

Key-words: small clauses; word order; adjectives; copula.

Este artigo examina o que chamamos de mini-orações livres, que, diferentemente de mini-orações dependentes, exibem algumas propriedades peculiares: (a) é restrita a ocorrer com adjetivos de indivíduo ou de evento, (b) tem que ter o sujeito posposto. Após considerar várias hipóteses sobre a natureza dessa inversão, propôs-se que os adjetivos que nela aparecem são do tipo ergativo. Essas mini-orações podem ser complementos de um tipo especial de cópula, do tipo que aparece com construções clivadas. As derivações das mini-orações livres seriam paralelas à derivação de construções clivadas.

Palavras-chave: mini-orações; ordem das palavras; adjetivos; cópula.

1. The data and the problem

The aim of this paper is to discuss the order of constituents in Brazilian Portuguese, hereafter BP, inside constructions that have been called 'small clauses' and to try to relate this order to what occurs in finite sentences. The primary aim is to analyze the nature of the peculiar case of BP free small clauses like those in (1):

Two kinds of small clauses have been proposed in the literature: those that function as complements (examples (2)) and those that function as adjuncts (examples (3)):

Verbs that require small clause complements can be of two types: exceptional case marking verbs (ECM), like the ones in (2)-(3), and raising verbs like 'parecer' ( seem) below:

Along the forms presented in (1)-(4) Portuguese has the following forms, in which the small clause subject and its redicate appear in inverted positions:

Not only ECM verbs, but also raising verbs, can have inversion inside their small clause complements:

As for free small clauses, the puzzling fact about them is that they can only appear in the inverted form:

Moreover, the adjectives that appear in these free small clauses are of the type that appears in the complement of consider type verbs.

Given these data, this paper will address the following questions:

(i) What is the internal structure of free and dependent small clauses?
(ii) What sort of inversion do we have in them?
(iii) Why is it that free small clauses cannot appear in the subject-predicate order as their dependent counterpart forms can?
(iv) Do BP free small clauses share any property with children's small clauses?

In section 2, I will present the two main proposals concerning the internal structure of dependent small clauses - the clausal hypothesis and the non-clausal hypothesis, arguing in favor of the clausal one. In section 3, I will study the order of the predicate phrase in relation to its subject NP, discussing four analyses considered in the inversion phenomenon in finite sentences: restructuring (section 3.1), the V-to-Comp analysis (section 3.2), ergative inversion (section 3.3), and Romance inversion (section 3.4). In section 4, I will present my analysis. In section 5, I will compare BP free small clauses with small clauses in children.

2. The internal structure of small clauses

All the analyses in the generative framework consider the highlighted sequences in (1)-(7) as containing a predication relation and the relevant NP as the subject in this relation. Two proposals have been presented in the literature to account for this relation: First (cf. (9)), the NP is in a clausal, or small clause relation with its predicate (cf. Stowell 1981, Chomsky 1981, Kitagawa 1985, Kuroda 1986, Chung & McCloskey 1987, and Stowell 1991). Second (cf. (10)), the predication relation is a function of this NP and the XP being co-indexed, with no requirement that the two be dominated by a clausal node (cf. Williams 1983, Emonds 1985).

Two different versions of the clausal hypothesis can be further found: (9) according to which the subject is the specifier of the X' phrase (Stowell, 1981) and (11) that defines the predication relation strictly in terms of the two maximal projections c-commanding each other (cf. Rothstein 1983):

Rothstein (1983), the proponent of representation (11) for small clauses, restricts its scope to main verbs that select a proposition, but not to cases like examples (4) and (5), in which the main verb selects entities and not propositions. For examples such as (4) and (5), Rothstein proposes a structure of adjunction like the one in (12), which she takes to be cases of secondary predication relations:

The arguments presented in the literature in favor of the clausal analysis are in greater number than the arguments against it, and the existence in Brazilian Portuguese of independent, or free small clauses, namely small clauses that are not complements or adjuncts in a sentence, adds strong empirical support to this hypothesis. As the constituents of the independent small clauses do not appear as sisters to a main clause verb, they will necessarily be dominated by a node in a clause-mate relationship.

In view of this conclusion regarding the structure of small clauses, we will examine the questions related to the inversion problem having the clausal hypothesis in mind.

3. The nature of inversion

3.1. The re-structuring, or incorporation hypothesis

The first hypothesis that I would like to consider is that inverted structures result from incorporation of the small clause predicate into the matrix verb, forming what has been called a complex predicate The representation of the adjective incorporated to the verb would be as shown below:

For Baker (1988) incorporation is a process that involves Xº movement and not XP-movement. If what is incorporated is just the head, we would expect, then, that adjectives, but not adjectival phrases could be moved. However, Brazilian Portuguese does not ban examples such as (15):

Likewise, we would expect nouns, but not noun phrases to be incorporated, but the expectation is not met:

Inversion is always possible in free small clauses with a more complex NP, but not natural with complex adjectives:

Empirically, a counter-argument for the incorporation or restructuring hypothesis is the existence of the independent small clauses. If they are not complements of a matrix verb, how can their predicate be incorporated?

Moreover, even assuming that examples such as (15) are not incorporation cases, the concept of head would have to be relaxed for (19) to allow pre-head elements like intensifiers and articles to be invisible in incorporation:

3.2. The V-to-COMP Hypothesis

As the landing site of V in V-to-Comp is COMP, we would have to assume that small clauses have COMP, an assumption contrary to what is currently believed. When compared to infinitival clauses, it will be evident that in the latter this node is well-motivated by wh-movement structures while with small clauses there is not such empirical motivation. Compare the two types of structure:

The logical explanation for the fact that a wh-word in small clauses in BP only lands at the beginning of the root sentence is that they lack COMP, and consequently its specifier position.

However, V-to-COMP has been described as a main clause phenomenon and we have seen that small clauses must have inversion when they are independent forms, while they can have it when they are subordinated complement clauses. Let us suppose that small clauses may have a CP when they are free, that is when they are root phenomena.

Suppose that inversion in free small clauses is of the same nature as that of exclamative degree wh-sentences, like (22), in which the [wh+adjective] is unequivocally moved to Spec of CP, a plausible hypothesis considering the translation given for English.

AGRP would not be a barrier for the [wh+adj] phrase movement, as the latter would be selected by the [+wh] feature of COMP.

However, we would be faced with three problems in this hypothesis. The first has to do with a cross linguistic difference. If English has wh-movement of [wh+adj], why is it that it does not have inversion in small clauses? The second has to do with the type of adjectives that can appear in [wh+adj] sentences and those that can appear in free small clauses. In the wh-adjective exclamations we can have both individual and stage-level adjectives:

The third argument to reject this solution is the obligatory SV order. VS order makes the sentence interrogative. Witness the contrast below:

In free small clauses we can have only adjectives selected by consider-type verbs, namely individual predicates:

[Wh+adj] sentences, on the other hand, are selected by psych verbs and not consider-type verbs:

3.3. The romance inversion hypothesis

It is a well-known fact that the so-called pro-drop languages exhibit the property of free subject predicate inversion, as was pointed out by Jaeggli (1981), Rizzi (1982), Torrego (1984), Barbosa (1995), and many others.

The property of subject-verb inversion that can be seen in the sentences below has been attributed to the pro-drop parameter, understood as a set of properties shared by many Romance languages. It has also been called 'free inversion' and has been exemplified with sentences like the following:

For Rizzi (1982) the postposed NP appears in adjunction to VP and is thus governed by INFL and assigned nominative case.

BP has been shown, however, to have inversion restricted to one argument verbs. This single-argument constraint (cf. Kato and Tarallo, 1988, 2003) is also operative in small clause constructions. Compare the restriction found in inflected clauses and small clauses:

Small clauses present, therefore, the same constraints of finite clauses, which makes us assume that the same licensing principles are operating in the small clause subject predicate inversion. However, Rizzi's proposal (or its variants) cannot be invoked for small clauses as, by definition, NPs and AdjPs lack tense inflection, which excludes assignment of nominative case by INFL within the small clause.

But the perfect parallelism between the constructions above and the forms below should be pointed out:

Strict pro-drop languages like Italian and Spanish are assumed to have an expletive pro instead of a referential pro in the subject position and the postposed noun would be less external than the antitopic position in Brazilian Portuguese. Lexical pronouns, which seem to be always referential in these languages, can only alternate with referential pro and not with expletive pro.

We could argue then that in Brazilian Portuguese the same sort of right-dislocation structure is involved in (31)-(34) above.

We are claiming therefore that at least for free small clauses inversion cannot be explained in terms of Romance inversion, at least in its referential pro version, which is the case of BP.

3.4. The ergative /unaccusative hypothesis

Kato and Tarallo (1988, 2003) have shown that, though Brazilian Portuguese has lost Romance inversion, ergative and unaccusative constructions are still quite productive and, while referential subjects tend to be filled by lexical pronouns, the expletive pronoun is still categorically null.

The consideration of adjectives as ergative predicates was defended by Cinque (1988) in his analysis of a certain class of adjectives in Italian. Among his empirical arguments are:

However, there is a class of ergative adjectives which take propositions and not entities as arguments (event adjectives in Cinque's sense), and in this case the copula is always ser:

These propositional adjectives can also appear in free small clauses, though they prefer infinitival or deverbal complements rather than full finite clauses:

When the complement of the verb is a finite clause, the non-ergative adjective can occur:

Another context, which distinguishes ergatives from unergatives, is the position of subject complements as noted by Raposo and Uriagereka (1995), who only use the individual-stage level distinction, and not the ergative-non-ergative one:

Cinque observes that in small clause complements in Italian the behavior of ergative and unergative adjectives is the same, both allowing inverted subjects, which makes him adopt the restructuring hypothesis:

The adjective opportuna, considered by Cinque to be unergative in Italian, has an identical lexical item in Portuguese, which behaves like the ergative ones, appearing in free small clause and prenominal position:

I will assume, therefore, that oportuno is a propositional ergative adjective in BP.

It should be pointed out, however, that cases of "inversion" with ergative adjectives can have two different S-structure representations. One is the pure ergative construction and the other is right dislocation structure with an empty resumptive pronoun (as discussed in section 3):

In (60b) the NP a abertura would be in an A' position co-indexed to pro, which is, thus, referential, differing from the expletive pro in (60a). Unergative adjectives can have 'inverted' structures represented in (60b) but not in (60a). The possibility of null subject languages to have a pro in subject position obscures the difference between an ergative construction with an expletive subject and a construction with an ergative/unergative verb with a pro subject coindexed with a NP in an A' position.

'Ser' and 'estar' adjectives (ergatives)

Only 'ser' adjectives (propositional ergatives):

Only 'estar' adjectives (unergatives)

We have so far established two types of adjectives in BP, the ones we will be calling ergatives, and the non-ergative ones, the latter not licensed in free small clauses. The claim that we would like to make here is that the order predicate-subject in small clauses is a base order with the selected NP generated as an internal argument of the ergative adjective or noun, exactly like in unaccusative constructions. The internal NP would optionally raise to the empty subject position.

The same contrast is observed between unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. With the latter, only raising is possible.

Summing up, the difference between ser and estar, seems to be in the fact that ser is an optional raising verb, while estar is a strict raising verb. But this is not enough to account for free small clauses, in which there seems to be no case-licenser for the postposed DP.

4. Our analysis: the third copula

Before we give a final solution to free small clauses, we will first examine the semantic interpretation of its predicate. Thus, observe the following pair of sentences:

The cleft sentence is analyzed as resulting from the movement of the predicate with +F features to the lower sentence FP position, right adjacent to the finite verb, a position licensed for non-V2 languages (Kato and Ribeiro, 2006). We may now consider that instead of a finite sentence with the complementizer que 'that', we can have a small clause, which is also assumed to license an FP position, in the sense of Belletti's (2004, 2005) proposal:

We claim, moreover, that the third copula is not a raising verb like the attributive copula we saw above, but a small ν, with less substantive content than a full V. If the AP has no FP extension, the predicate can undergo movement to CP/FP, where it can also have the +F feature checked:

The copula+INFL is also a probe for case and j-feature checking:

Our last claim is that the third copula can be erased at PF, when in sentence initial position, yielding the free small clauses we have been trying to analyze.

Now, recall that stage-level predicates have obligatory raising, and, therefore, a small clause containing them is incompatible with the third copula, which either selects a CP or a small clause containing an ergative predicate. However, recall that this restriction does not hold if estar appears inside CP.

5. Small children's free small clauses

Since Brown's (1973) seminal work, child language has been shown to contain copula-drop, both as the main verb and the auxiliary:

Radford (1990) builds a theory in which this is because small children speak small clauses, and these include predication without the copula. For Radford, the subject in children's small clauses are licensed through a 'default' accusative case ( me tired).

Schütze (ms.) assigns V-status to the copula and relates copula-drop to the Optional Infinitive phenomenon, namely to underspecification of Tense.

We might wonder whether free small clauses in BP share any property with children's small clauses. The following facts lead us to claim that we have distinct phenomena, for the following reasons: First, children's free small clauses are not restricted to individual level predicates. In fact, the auxiliary be is stage level. Second, semantically, the predicate in children's small clauses is the informational focus while in BP free small clauses, the predicate is the narrow focus and the subject a presupposed element in the context. Third, considering that in null subject languages the default case is nominative, the subject in BP should be nominative by 'default'. But the loss of clitics in BP does not allow full testing of the subject pronominal form, except for the first person, which still has an asymmetry between nominative and accusative. However, BP free small clauses refer mostly to the addressee or a third party, and not to the first person.

(i) It selects a clausal complement, whether a CP or a small clause;
(ii) In the latter case it precludes raising.

(iii) Its predicate is assigned a Focus reading;

(iv) Phonologically it can be erased when it is in sentence initial position.

The third property is what distinguishes a normal, non-finite cleft type of construction from free small clauses.

In short, adult small clauses in BP are ordinary finite cleft sentences.

______. 2005. Answering with a "cleft": the role of the null subject parameter and the VP periphery. In: L. Bruye et alii. (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th Incontro de Grammatica Generativa. Venice: Cafoscarina. 63-82. [ Links ]

Kato, M. A. and I. Ribeiro. 2007. A evolução das estruturas clivadas no português. In: T. Lobo, I. Ribeiro, Z. Carneiro & N. Almeida (eds.) Para a história do português brasileiro. Vol 6: A experiência dos grupos de estudo. Tomo I. Salvador: EDUFBA. 165-182. [ Links ]

______. 2003. The loss of VS syntax in Brazilian Portuguese. In: S. Lange, I. Koch & K. [ Links ]

E-mail: ma.kato@uol.com.br
* This work was supported by CNPq (grant 303274/2005-0) and FAPESP (Projeto Temático 2006/00965-2). I would like to thank Cilene Rodrigues for her comments and suggestions, as editor, and Andrew Nevins for his kind language revision.
1 We will leave out small clauses with NPs (like the one in (1c)) and PPs, and concentrate our study on AP small clauses.
2 We will translate only the number inflection in the glosses, but gender is also inflected in these cases.
3 The examples in (7) are acceptable when interpreted as noun phrases. My point here is that they cannot achieve the free relative clause interpretation observed in (1).
4 This does not mean that non-referential pro in impersonal or expletive constructions is also reanalyzed.
5 This property is not relevant for BP as it has no ne-cliticization.
6 This is parallel to what happens with regard to the ergative adjectives, and the unergative injustificada 'unjustified', but not with perigosa 'danger':

7 This property does not hold for BP. Both (a) and (b) are bad in BP.
8 This property does not seem to distinguish the two types of adjectives in BP either.
9 In the vernacular, agreement is lost, as shown in (i).

10 We could consider the partitive case proposed by Belletti (1988) for unaccusative arguments, but the semantic import of this case is that it is always indefinite, while in free small clauses, the postposed subject is always definite.
11 I am assuming that being a ν , and not a full V, the third copula cannot have predicates incorporated into it.

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Free and depedent small clauses in Brazilian Portuguese

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Mini-orações livres e dependentes em Português Brasileiro Universidade Estadual de Campinas This paper examines free small clauses, which, unlike dependent small clauses, exhibit peculiar properties: (a) they are restricted to occur with individual level and event adjectives, (b) they have to appear with the subject postposed.

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Este site te leva a uma página da internet que eu achei foi muito interessante porque fala de a syntactic da língua portuguesa em uma forma muito technica. Como sou estudante da linguística, eu vejo muitas explicações como estas no minhas aulas então eu achei que a informação foi muito informativa.

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Note that in the system presented here, the only word not bearing a dependency marker is the main verb (MV), which functions as head for subject (SUBJ>), direct/accusative object (<ACC) and adverbial (ADVL>), whose dependency markers all point towards the verb. Within the noun phrase

Eckhard Bick
PORTUGUESE SYNTAX

1. Introduction: Grammatical conventions

Within grammar, syntax deals with the linear structure of language, trying to explain how words (the minimal units of syntax) interact in forming a sentence (the maximal unit of syntax). In our approach, special attention will be paid to the form and function of syntactic units. Individual words as well as more complex structural parts of a sentence (groups and clauses) can all be described in terms of form and function.

Words and sentences

A simple definition of a word - especially useful for written language - states that words are alphanumeric strings delimited by blank spaces or punctuation in a text. This includes multi-word abbreviations like "PTB" or "DNA", and from a more pragmatic point of view (to be taken in this book), complex lexical units like "Estados Unidos", "em vez de", "anti-gás" may also qualify as "words".

With the same logic one can define a sentence as text delimited by a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, or - syntactically - any functionally coherent chain of words, including one-word utterances like "venha!" and verbless statements like "ai, pobre de mim!".

Form and function

Different grammatical approaches describe sentences in different ways, focussing on different aspects of syntactic form and function.

Morphologically, form is the way in which words are composed and inflected - the basic unit being a morpheme - while morphological function deals with a given morphemes function within the word. The word comamos, for instance, can morphologically be analysed as the morpheme-string com(1)-a(2)-mos(3), where (1) is the word's lemmatic root, (2) a subjunctive vowel marker, and (3) the 1.person plural ending, while tense is not explicited (present tense as zero morpheme). Words can be assigned morphological word classes according to which categories of inflection or derivation they allow. Thus, comemos is a verb, because it features mode (subjunctive), tense (present), person (1.) and number (plural).

Syntactically, form is the way in which a sentence is structured, i.e. how its words are chained, ordered and grouped. Syntactic function, then, is how words or groups of words function in relation to each other or to the sentence as a whole. Words can be assigned syntactic word classes according to which categories of syntactic form or function they allow. Prepositions, for example, are usually defined not morphologically, but by syntactic form, i.e. as "headers" for noun groups or infinitives.

Syntactic models

Three basic types of syntactic models will be discussed in the following, on the one hand the classical functional model, on the other hand the form based approaches of dependency and constituent grammar which in their pure form both leave function implicit. Next, we will discuss how different models can be integrated so as to cover both form and function, as is the case when function labels are added to a dependency or constituent diagram, or when dependency markers are attached to function labels as in the word based Constraint Grammar model.

1.1.

The flat classical model: word function, no form

This is the system taught in Danish primary schools, albeit with symbols ("kryds og bolle") instead of letters. The system allows ordinary running text, and yields a simple structure, which is psychologically easy to grasp, since function markers are attached to the semantically "heavy" words in the sentence, rather than to

O

meu

hipopótamo

não

come

peixe.

groups of words (it is hipopótamo that receives the subject tag, not o meu hipopótamo.

S

A

V

O

1.2.

Pure Dependency Grammar:

word chains (syntactic form), no function

In Dependency Grammar every word is attached to another word, its head, of which it is a dependent. A word can have more than one dependent, but only one head. The finite verb roles as pivot of the sentence, being its uppermost node.

Dependency Grammar does not use word-less nodes or zero (empty) constituents, and its strictly word-based analysis has the pedagogical advantage of not having to "see" larger units before constituent relations can be established. Rather, constituents grow larger as the analysis progresses. Thus, it doesn't matter whether meu is attached to hipopótamo before or after hipopótamo is attached to come.

In dependency grammar, syntactic function is expressed indirectly as the asymmetrical relation between heads and dependents.

1.3.

Pure Constituent Grammar:

Hierarchical word grouping (syntactic form), no function

(Acredito (que (o meu hipopótamo) não come peixe))

Conceptually, Constituent Grammar works "top-down", - a sentence is split into (maximal) constituents, and those constituents that are not words but groups of words, are marked by a "non-terminal" (i.e. word-less) node on that level (small circles in the illustration), and are further split into a new generation of (maximal) constituents, on the next lower level, - and so on, until terminal nodes (words) are reached throughout the whole tree.

Constituent Grammar can be expressed by rewriting rules, where a certain type of non-terminal node can be rewritten as a sequence of non-terminals and terminals (words or word classes). Noun phrases, for instance, could be rewritten as a chain of optional articles, pronouns and adjectives followed by a noun. With a complete set of rewriting rules a generative constituent grammar seeks to define all and only of such word sequences that form sentences in a given language.

In constituent grammar, syntactic function is expressed indirectly as the way in which constituents can be combined into larger constituents (in English, for instance, a subject would be that np [noun phrase] which is left when you strip a clause of its vp [verb phrase]).

Usually none of the models described here are used in teaching in pure form. Hybrid models, where models make use of each other's terminology, are not uncommon. Thus, Constituent Grammar can be made to handle dependency relations, and both Dependency Grammar and Constituent Grammar can easily be enriched by functional information from the classical model.

1.4.

Adding function

1.4.1.

Dependency Grammar with function labels

In the example, hipopótamo has not only been identified as head of o and meu and as dependent of come, but also as subject (S), while its dependents have been classified as article-modifier (ART) and determiner-modifier (DET), respectively.

1.4.2.

Constraint Grammar

Constraint Grammaruses a flat dependency notation in combination with function labels, thus integrating the classical system of word based function. Directed open dependency markers (> = head to the right, < = head to the left) are attached to individual words, and combined with function symbols:
O >N meu >N hipopótamo SUBJ> não ADVL> come MV peixe <ACC
O meu hipopótamo, only the head points outward/upward, and it is the head that bears the group's function as a whole. o and meu attach as prenominal modifiers (>N) to a noun (N) to the right (>). Note that at the clause level the head is not specified at the dependency arrow head, since only one type of head is possible (V, a verb), while at the group level heads are specified (here: N for noun), while function is underspecified in the symbol, since at group level only one type of dependent is recognised (adject).
1.4.3.

Enriched Constituent Grammar

Dependency grammar's different concept of syntactic form can be integrated into the constituent grammar notation, yielding a minimum of function:

As can be seen, of the constituents at any given level (with the exception of the top node), there is now always one (and only one) "primus inter pares", the groups head (H), degrading its other constituents into dependents (DEP).In the same fashion, function can be added. The English VISL system, for instance, is a hybrid model where function has been introduced at the clause level:

Also on the form side, both dependency and constituent models presented here can be enriched. Thus, apart from model-inherent information about syntactic form, one can, for instance, mark word nodes for (morphological) word class. Regarding non-terminal nodes in tree structures one can distinguish between groups and clauses, and subdivide these according to structure and typical head classes. A noun phrase (np)can thus both be defined (i) as a group with a noun as head, or (ii) as a group allowing articles, determiners or adjectives as inflecting modifiers.

Following VISL conventions, both form and function should be made explicit for every word or node (bracket), with function symbols in capitals and form symbols in small letters, the two being separated by a colon (horizontal notation) or an underline (vertical notation).

Using the Portuguese symbol set, we get, for the above example, the following tree:

In Constraint Grammar's flat dependency notation, the same tree can be expressed as in-text information without bracketing, with group information subscripted at the group's head, and subclause information superscripted at the clause's first verb or complementizer:

Acredito MV:v que SUB:conj<ACC:fcl o>N:art meu>N:det hipopótamo SUBJ>:n não ADVL>:adv come MV:v peixe.

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Note that in the system presented here, the only word not bearing a dependency marker is the main verb (MV), which functions as head for subject (SUBJ>), direct/accusative object ( ), whose dependency markers all point towards the verb. Within the noun phrase Eckhard Bick PORTUGUESE SYNTAX 1.

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Este site te leva a uma página da internet que fala da importância do acordo entre o adjectivo e o subjuntivo no português. Eu acho que a informação apresentada nesta articulo é importante porque nos ensina como construir oração em português que tem sentido.

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What you need to know about adjectives 1) Word Order
In Portuguese, unlike in English, adjectives almost always come after the noun.

Examples: Um homem rico (A rich man); Uma banana amarela (a yellow banana), Um homem interessante (an interesting man).
2) Masculine / Feminine / SIngular / Plural
Portuguese adjectives have to "agree" with the noun they are describing. This means that if the noun is masculine singular (eg um homem / "a man") - then the adjective has to be masculine singular too. Or if the noun is feminine plural (for example "umas bananas" / some bananas) then the adjective has to be feminine plural too.

When you learn the words it's best if you learn the masculine singular and then make the changes. It's not difficult:

Study the following chart.
Adjectives ending in "__e" or "__ista"
Adjectives ending in "__e" or "__ista" have the same form for masculine and feminine.
Return to Grammar page

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What you need to know about adjectives 1) Word Order In Portuguese, unlike in English, adjectives almost always come after the noun. Examples: Um homem rico (A rich man); Uma banana amarela (a yellow banana), Um homem interessante (an interesting man).

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Este sitio te leva a uma pagina da internet que eu acho e muito interesante. A página fala do ordem das palavras em português. O que eu gostei muito da pagina foi a organização da informação. Para começar, fala de uma das diferenças mais granges entre o ordem das palavras em portugues e ingles, depois explica exatamente como cambiar ordem defendendo no que tipo de oração você diz.

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Portuguese Word order.

Easy ways to remember.

Boas!
Today we are going to learn about how the Portuguese word order works.
We are also going to learn how you can put words together in order to build sentences and express your thoughts.

As you know, when you speak, you use sounds.

These sounds can be graphically represented by written words.

These words will build sentences.

These sentences have to be placed in a specific order to express your ideas and thoughts.

And this order shows the way you want others to understand you.

The spectacular capacity of your brain allows you to express your thoughts by mouth noises which, when uttered in a particular order, allow you to communicate.

This applies to all spoken languages and obviously Portuguese is no exception.

My point with all of this is to make you think about the way you speak in your own language first.

Then you may realise that when you speak, you convert your thoughts into words which together and in a specific order, allow you to say what you want to say, and want others to understand.

But, if you are thinking that getting used to the correct way of putting words together and making sentences in Portuguese is not an easy task, I have good news for you.

OK, if you read any text in Portuguese or if you listen to a native Portuguese speaker talking, you may notice that sometimes the word order in Portuguese is different than the word order in English. And that's true sometimes.

You may also realise, for instance, that, whereas you say in English "Maria has a beautiful car", a Portuguese native speaker would literally say "Maria has a car beautiful".

I know, I know, this is not always the case. But remember there is a reason for everything.

The good news is that, generally speaking, the structure of a sentence in Portuguese is not much different than the one in English.

You only have to pay attention to specific cases and, at the beginner, pay attention to the kind of sentence you want to use.

The Portuguese word order is Subject (S) > Verb (V)> Object (O).

Then, you just have to link the different small sentences together with clauses to construct your story.

Basically, in order for you to get a good Portuguese word order, you just have to take into account five aspects:

1. If your sentence is a statement.

2. If your sentence is a statement-question
(a statement with a question mark at the end).

3. If your sentence is a direct question
(with a question word at the beginning and a question mark at the end).

4. If your sentence is negative
(with a negative word in it, like "não").

5. If your sentence includes a description of something
(with an adjective).

Can't quite get what I'm saying here? No worries. Let me explain one by one with some examples:

1. If a sentence is a statement.

If your sentence is a statement, you are expressing a fact. Normally you are talking about a specific event. Let's analyse the following sentences in pairs - first the Portuguese and then the English, sentence by sentence. Please compare and contrast the Portuguese word order and the English carefully.

You see, only with these type of sentences you could easily tell a story to somebody, by placing one simple sentence after another using the correct Portuguese word order.

Another interesting thing is, as you can also see, you can use the same Portuguese word order in the present, past and future tenses.

Please be aware that, when speaking in Portuguese, the subject (eu, tu, você, nós, eles, etc.) is often hidden.

This means that the verb itself indicates the subject of that sentence: e.g. " Vamos estudar hoje e amanhã." to say " We are going to study today and tomorrow."

You can also place the adverbs "today" ' "hoje" and "tomorrow" "amanhã" either at the beginning or at the end of your sentence.

Did you get this? Great! Let's jump to the next case.

2. If a sentence is an statement-question
(a statement with a question mark at the end).

If you want to ask a question in Portuguese, the Portuguese word order is exactly the same as when you make a statement. All you have to do is to raise the intonation at the end to make it sound as a question.

Please note however that whereas in English you need to use a verb at the beginning when you ask a question, in Portuguese you don't.

So, if it helps, when you are transferring your thoughts from English into Portuguese try to imagine that you could ask questions in English without the words "do", or "are" or "will", etc. at the beginning of a question:

e.g. in English you would say " Are you (gentlemen) going to schedule a meeting for tomorrow?", but in Portuguese you would say "Os senhores vão marcar a reunião para amanhã?". You start your question with the verb straight away.

In order for you to understand the correct Portuguese word order, let's observe the same phrases as above as examples:

When asking a question out loud, please don't forget to raise the intonation at the end.

OK, did you understand this second rule of the Portuguese word order? Did you get it? Good! Let-s see number three.

3. If a sentence is a direct question
(with a question word at the beginning and a question mark at the end).

In this case, in order for you to get a good Portuguese word order, all you need is a question word at the beginning of your sentence and then a statement.

Let's, once again look at the following examples. Please read them carefully one by one and pay attention to the Portuguese word order.

You see, the Portuguese word order when you ask a question is not very different from the previous explanations.

You basically keep the normal structure that a statement has adding a question word at the beginning, and obviously raising the intonation at the end, when you are speaking.

Bang! Easy! Let-s go for number four.

4. If a sentence is negative
(with the word "não" in it).

If the sentence you want to build is a negative sentence, and I mean a statement a deny (e.g. "I don't like salmon" - "Eu não gosto de salmão"), you need to place the negative word before the verb in order to get a correct Portuguese word order.

Negative words are often " não" (no, don't), " nunca" (never), " nem" (nor).

Nevertheless remember: The word order in Portuguese is still the same:

Subject. (S) > Verb (V)> Object (O).

Let's analyse some more examples of the Portuguese word order:

Do you have everything under control so far? If yes, move on to Portuguese word order rule number five.

5. If a sentence is descriptive
(with an adjective).

Here there is a radical change if you compare both, the Portuguese word order and the English one.

The descriptive word (in other words, the adjective) needs to be placed after the noun all the time.

As I mentioned above whereas in English you place the adjective before the noun, e.g. "Maria has a beautiful car", in Portuguese you need to place the adjective after the noun like "Maria has a car beautiful".

I know! It doesn't sound right when you think in English, but in the Portuguese word order it makes all sense. Believe me!

Also, when it comes to using adjectives (or describing words) in a sentence, you may use more than one.

But let's illustrate this explanation of the Portuguese word order with some examples:

Did you notice that the adjective 1 was placed the other way round compared to English?

Well, this is not big deal either, is it? If you understand this structure, let's jump to the next step to fully understand the Portuguese word order.

Practice all the structures now!

Yes, this is your next step! Don't let yourself be satisfied just by reading this page. Do some practice now.

Try to make up a story with small sentences. Put them together in the negative, asking direct and indirect questions, using adjectives, and so on. Use the correct Portuguese word order now.

Just write sentences down in Portuguese and read them out loud.

You will see that your Portuguese will improve quickly!

If you need to consult the different types of words, click here .

Go Back From Portuguese Word Order To Grammar.

Go Back To Home Page.

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Boas! Today we are going to learn about how the Portuguese word order works. We are also going to learn how you can put words together in order to build sentences and express your thoughts. As you know, when you speak, you use sounds. These sounds can be graphically represented by written words.

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Este link te leva a uma página da internet que fala da ordem das palavras no português. O blog é interessante porque dá exemplos de situações onde o ordem de palavras seria igual o diferente que o ordem em português.

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Ordem das palavras em Português

Olá, gente! Hey, guys!

Like in English, the word order in Portuguese follows the organization: Sujeito > Verbo > Objeto | Subject > Verb > Object. But, of course, there are some slight differences. Not to worry, though! Today we'll cover how the word order works in Portuguese. That way, you'll learn how to put words together and build sentences in order to express yourself and communicate better. Below you can find some tips as to how the elements are disposed and take a look at some examples to compare and contrast with the English language.
1. Afirmação - Statement
You are simply expressing a fact or declaring something, so the order is very similar to English in this case. Look:
My neighbor is French

Eu gosto de tomar uma cerveja depois do trabalho
I like to have a beer after work

Nós comemos muito macarrão no restaurante
We ate a lot of pasta at the restaurant She went to Paris in the summer 2. Pergunta - Question
When we ask a question in Portuguese, there is no inversion of the word order like in English (also, there is not need for an auxiliary verb), so a question is structured exactly like a statement (Você perdeu - Você perdeu? | You lost - Did you lose? ). In order to indicate that you are asking a question in spoken language, all you have to do is inflect the final word so it will sound like a question. Take a look:
3. Frases negativas - Negative sentences
The negative word (like não | or nunca | ) is always placed before the verb in Portuguese. So all you have to do is insert the word before the verb appears (again, there is no need for auxiliary verbs). Look below:
4. Frases com adjetivos - Sentences with adjectives
The noun comes before the adjective in Portuguese, therefore the opposite from English. If there is an intensifier like muito | , we add it between the noun and the adjective. See the examples:

Tenham uma boa semana! Have a good week!

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Ordem das palavras em Português Olá, gente! Hey, guys! Like in English, the word order in Portuguese follows the organization: Sujeito > Verbo > Objeto | Subject > Verb > Object. But, of course, there are some slight differences. Not to worry, though! Today we'll cover how the word order works in Portuguese.

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Este link te leva a uma página da internet que nos ensina como usar o verbo ser, quando usando adjetivos. Acho que é uma página muito prática porque fala de as situações onde usarias diferentes versiones de ser dependendo em o objeto de que você fala.

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Adjectives are words used to describe everything that exists in the world: people, animals, nature and its phenomena, and things. In Portuguese, an adjective must agree in gender and in number with the word that it is describing. Most of the time it is accompanied by a form of verb to be: Ser or Estar.

As we mentioned in our post about nouns, in Portuguese there are two genders which are used to represent not only people and animals, but also things. Then, when you want to use an adjective to describe a word in Portuguese, you need to take into consideration whether it's in the masculine or feminine form and whether it's in the plural or singular while making the necessary adjustment.

Another thing to consider is the form of you're going to use. If you're describing an intrinsic quality or characteristic - which is something that is part of the noun you're talking about, you need to use verb If you're describing a temporary condition or state of the noun you're talking about, you need to use

When you're talking about people, in the case of an intrinsic quality you can also use verb ter (to have).

I'm glad you're here! If you're just starting on your journey of Portuguese learning, be sure to check out the Starter Guide.

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Adjectives in Portuguese ~ Brazilian Portuguese in a Snap

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Adjectives are words used to describe everything that exists in the world: people, animals, nature and its phenomena, and things. In Portuguese, an adjective must agree in gender and in number with the word that it is describing. Most of the time it is accompanied by a form of verb to be: Ser or Estar.

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Es

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Est

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Este

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Este

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Est

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Es

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Este link te leva a uma página de internet que nos ensina como fazer o plural no português. Eu gostei muito desta pagina da internet porque explica como fazer o plural com diferentes tipos de palavras, então é um bom recurso para aprender como fazer os plurales no português.

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In Portuguese, differently than in English, not only the nouns have plural forms, but the adjectives do as well. Remember an adjective in Portuguese has to agree in gender (masculine or feminine) and in number (singular or plural) with the noun it refers to.

Words Ending in a Vowel (a, e, i, o, u):

As a general rule, if a word ends in a vowel (), all you need is to add anto it. But as in English, there are some exceptions to making the plural in Portuguese. But don't worry too much about them; just learn the new words both in the singular and the plural.
Examples:
Words Ending in an l:
Examples:
Words ending in em:

If a word ends in, you take off the and add to the rest of the word to make it plural. If a word has an accent on the , you carry the accent to the plural form.
Examples:
Words ending in r, s or z:

If a word ends in either r, s or z, just add an to the word to make it plural.
Examples:
- has an accent because it's a strong monosyllable word ending in but the accent is not carried over to the plural form.

Words ending in ão:

A word ending in , can have one of the three following different endings in the plural form:, . You're going to notice that the majority of the nouns in this case are going to have their plural end in . Don't worry about it. As you learn new words ending in , just memorize their plural. That's exactly what Brazilians do.
Examples:
*In this case, you're really just adding an to the word.

Just as in English, in Portuguese there some nouns that are already in the plural. This means that the word does not have a singular form just the plural.
Examples:
I'm glad you're here! If you're just starting on your journey of Portuguese learning, be sure to check the Starter Guide.

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The Plural in Portuguese ~ Brazilian Portuguese in a Snap

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In Portuguese, differently than in English, not only the nouns have plural forms, but the adjectives do as well. Remember an adjective in Portuguese has to agree in gender (masculine or feminine) and in number (singular or plural) with the noun it refers to.

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Este link nos leva a uma página de internet que fala da pronúncia no português em comparação a outras línguas românicas. Nos ensina os fatores que fazem a pronúncia no português mais difícil mas também o que a faz mais fácil de fazer se você é um falante de inglês.

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People say that Portuguese pronunciation is very difficult, but I've seen harder (wink wink). Learning Portuguese is a little bit easier than learning French but not the same as learning Spanish. And, if you're an English speaker, you might have an advantage. Portuguese structure is simpler than English structure and the nasal sounds aren't that difficult to pick up. However, there are some tricky words and combinations.

Thanks to our level of difficulty in pronunciation, Portuguese people are usually good at pronouncing other languages. We can make the two sounds of the letter "R" for example. Of course, we struggle with languages like German, Hungarian and the Nordic languages.

Although the Portuguese language adopted some spelling reforms in the past years that facilitate writing and reading, that didn't affect pronunciation. But don't worry. Actually, I see friends having fun while learning Portuguese and it's incredible to see how fast people can learn and speak the language! But it is challenging...I'm sorry!

Let's go through those challenges, shall we?

Portuguese Pronunciation: Vowels

Portuguese vowels aren't a nightmare but they need some work. Just like in French, there are different sounds depending on the stress of the word and accents. There are three statuses for Portuguese vowels: open, closed and muted (for the letter "E").

Plain vowels

A - open has an emphasis in the A: "parte" (AH sound), like " " and closed is a soft A: "américa" (towards to UH sound), like .

Portuguese Pronunciation: Consonants

Overall, the Portuguese alphabet is like the English one. We have the "Ç" but we don't make a big deal about it and it's treated as a normal "C" in the dictionary. Also, although we now have the "K", "W" and "Y", we only use them for foreign words and they have the same sound as the original language. In general, Portuguese consonants aren't different from the English, but in some cases you should follow the rules to know which sound to use for the same consonant.

Pronouncing CH, LH, NH

Yes, they seem scary but, in fact, after you learn the sound they become quite easy. Plus, they are very easy to identify. Portuguese language learners are always afraid of pronouncing these!

"LH" is /ʎ/. Unfortunately, there is no English equivalent but it's like the "ll" in Spanish or the sound of "gl" (Ex: Cagliari), in Italian.

"NH" is /ɲ/. Like the French word " " or Spanish " " or " " in English. Once you hear the sound and imitate it, you'll see it isn't as hard as you thought.

Four Ways of pronouncing S and Z

Basically, there are four rules to pronounce S and Z. You'll have to memorize which one is used in the word.

What is voiced and unvoiced? It's whether the vocal chords vibrate or not when making that sound.

C or Ç?

The Two Sounds of R

Ok, this might be easier for French or German people since they have the same sounds, but with a little practice you'll get there! If "R" is at the beginning of the word, you must pronounce it hard like the French "r". Imagine the sound of a dog when it's angry: " ", it's something like that! Otherwise, it's a soft /r/, like cronológico - like chronological in English.

The nasal sound ÃO

Maybe not that easy, but the famous nasal sound in Portuguese pronunciation can definitely be improved with practice. Although I can't translate it into a specific word in English, try to say the word " " or " " by squeezing your nose with two fingers in order to obtain a nasal sound. Now say them without squeezing. Do you hear the difference? I'm sure you do! To make it perfect you just need to accentuate the sound. The symbol on top of "A" is called - in Portuguese, -, and indicates that the sound is nasal. Other nasal words: , , .

My advice? Read the rules, memorize them and practice - a lot. Record yourself pronouncing the words and learn from your mistakes. When it comes to pronouncing, you'll need a lot of persistence. However, don't worry if you don't sound exactly like your Portuguese friends. Linguist researcher Stephen Krashen has said in the past that many adults learn languages let their analytical tendencies kick in and they try to correct all perceived errors. This isn't helpful. Don't worry so much and just go with the flow, you'll get there eventually.

Free Grammar Guide and How to Use LingQ

Before showing you how you can use LingQ to improve your Portuguese, I want to share something with you...

Here's a free Portuguese Grammar guide that will help you get to know adverbs, nouns, and much, much more.

Alright, now back to LingQ.

In order to improve your Portuguese skills (not just pronunciation), you're going to need to read. Thanks to LingQ, you can learn Portuguese online by accessing 1000s of hours of great content and learn the basics in no time. Most of which contains audio so you can hear how the words are pronounced.

LingQ allows you to look up new words and save them with a simple click of a button. Read the transcripts and listen along to the dialogue on your desktop or your phone ( Android and iOS). Best part of all, if you cannot find content you're interested in, import your own. For further information, check out our complete guide to importing content into LingQ.
*** Rute Martins has learned English, Spanish and French over the years. She is a native Portuguese speaker and has years of experience teaching the language.

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The Main Rules of Portuguese Pronunciation - LingQ Blog

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People say that Portuguese pronunciation is very difficult, but I've seen harder (wink wink). Learning Portuguese is a little bit easier than learning French but not the same as learning Spanish. And, if you're an English speaker, you might have an advantage.

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Este link nos leva a uma página de internet que nos ensina os consonantes na língua portuguesa. A página dá exemplos de pronunciação e uma comparação de a pronúncia no português e em inglês. Acho que esta página posse ser muito beneficial no processo que praticar a pronúncia de palavras no português.

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Mostly the same as English, but...

People from certain parts of Brazil have a habit of pronouncing the letters 'de' and 'di'as a hard 'j' (like the English 'j'), so they say things like 'Bom Jia'. Similarly, they often pronounce the letters 'te' and 'ti' like the 'ch' in 'chair'.

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Mostly the same as English, but... People from certain parts of Brazil have a habit of pronouncing the letters 'de' and 'di'as a hard 'j' (like the English 'j'), so they say things like 'Bom Jia'. Similarly, they often pronounce the letters 'te' and 'ti' like the 'ch' in 'chair'.

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Este link te leva a uma página de internet que fala da pronunciación de a letra r no português. Esto fosse muito interessante para mim, porque a letra r tem muita variação em pronunciation dependendo em que região do brasil você está. Acho que este vídeo foi muito interessante porque nos ensina que a pronunciação da r não e como a pronúncia em espanhol mas si sigue a mesma regla.

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In this pronunciation lesson you will learn the pronunciation of the letter R in Brazilian Portuguese.

This video lesson is a part of the Street Smart Brazil Portuguese Starter Kit. In this series we give you important pronunciation tips to improve your pronunciation whether you are just starting out with Portuguese or want to improve your language skills.

The examples I will use in the lesson come from four Brazilian songs. Click the links below to get to the lyrics and videos:

The video for this pronunciation lesson is below. Boa aula!

The R as the first letter of the word

When the R is the first letter of the word, we pronounce it like the H in English, as in "hotel", or the J in Spanish, as in "Jose".

From the song Ao Meu Redor:

From Águas de Março:

The double R: RR

We also pronounce the double RR like the H in English, such as in "hotel", or the J in Spanish, as in "Jose".

From Ao Meu Redor:

From Águas de Março:

The R at the end of a word or syllable

When the R is the last letter of a syllable or a word, its pronunciation will vary with the different Brazilian accents. Marisa Monte and Elis Regina are from Rio de Janeiro, so they pronounce it like the English H, such as in hotel. But you will often hear this final R pronounced differently. Just keep your years open to the different ways Brazilians speak.

From Ao Meu Redor:

From Aquarela:

The R between two vowels

When you have a single R between two vowels, that is, when the R forms a syllable with the vowel that comes after it, the R is pronounced approximately like the American English T in words such as "party" or "quarter". This applies throughout Brazil.

From Ao Meu Redor:
Learn how to say the months of the year in Portuguese!
From Aquarela:

Pronunciation tip: Linking words

When we have a word the ends in R followed by a word that starts with a vowel, we tend to put those together. In other words, that final R will form a syllable with the vowel that starts the next word. This happens throughout Brazil. I show you two examples in the video lesson for this post - see below!

Have fun observing the R in Brazilian Portuguese. I encourage you to learn with songs. For great tips and strategies to learn language using music and other media resources, check out Susanna Zaraysky's book Language is Music. It is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese on Amazon.com.

Street Smart Brazil teaches Portuguese via webcam. Please visit our website to meet our amazing team, learn about our teaching approach, and book a trial session with us.

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Brazilian Portuguese Pronunciation: The Letter R | Street Smart Brazil

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In this pronunciation lesson you will learn the pronunciation of the letter R in Brazilian Portuguese. This video lesson is a part of the Street Smart Brazil Portuguese Starter Kit.

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O vídeo que eu escolhi fala das diferenças entre a língua portuguesa falada em Portugal e a língua portuguesa falada no brasil. Eu gostei muito deste vídeo porque a mulher que nos ensina as diferenças usa muitos exemplos da vida real. Os vídeos de pessoas brasileiras e portuguesas falado em entrevistas mostram claramente as diferenças das que ela fala.

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PORTUGAL PORTUGUESE vs. BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

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Este link fala das línguas crioulas portuguesas, começa com uma explicação de o que é uma língua crioula e como é que estas línguas podem ser criadas. Fala principalmente de línguas crioulas portuguesas. Nos ensina geograficamente a distribuição de diferentes línguas crioulas que foram influenciadas pela língua Portuguesa.

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Introduction

Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have been significantly influenced by Portuguese.

Portugal in the period of discoveries and colonization created a linguistic contact with native languages and people of the discovered lands and pidgins were formed. Until the 18th century, these Portuguese pidgins were used as a lingua franca in Asia and Africa. These creoles are spoken, mostly, by inter-racial communities (Portuguese people with natives).

Later, the Portuguese pidgins were expanded grammatically and lexically, as they became creole languages. Today, these languages are known as "Portuguese creoles". The Portuguese creoles or Portuguese-based creoles are the ones that have almost all lexical content bases on Portuguese, while grammatically they are very different.

Geographic distribution

Portuguese creoles were purportedly once widely used in Asia, though probably more frequently as trade languages than as mother tongues. They survive today in Hong Kong and to some extent in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and a portion of the west coast of India. In Africa, Portuguese creoles are used by more than 450,000 people in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, the Cape Verde Islands, and some Gulf of Guinea islands (Annobn in Equatorial Guinea, where it is losing ground to Spanish, and Sõo Tomé and Príncipe, where more than four-fifths of the 125,000 inhabitants speak creole dialects). In Brazil a Portuguese creole was once widespread, extending even to Suriname, where Portuguese Jews and their slaves fled in the 17th century; the creole is now virtually extinct.

Creole Portuguese in the Far East

The Portuguese language was in XVI-XVIII centuries the trade language of the Indian Ocean shores. Although the portuguese influence on weakened rapidly, the Portuguese language survived. Even today there are communities that continue speaking Creole Portuguese languages without even being in touch with Portugal for years or centuries.

Classification

Portuguese based creole Languages Sorted Alphabetically

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Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have been significantly influenced by Portuguese. Portugal in the period of discoveries and colonization created a linguistic contact with native languages and people of the discovered lands and pidgins were formed. Until the 18th century, these Portuguese pidgins were used as a lingua franca in Asia and Africa.

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Este link fala da língua portuguesa no Brasil. Nos explica os fatores que fazem o português brasileiro único e especial. Por a influência das diferentes culturas no Brasil, faz muita variedade em dialetos e acentos. O sítio fala de as diferenças que ocorrem nas diferentes regiões dependendo em estas influências.

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When Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, does dialect variation across its vast territories make the local language easier or harder to learn? Do regional differences present language barriers to non-native speakers with only a basic understanding of Portuguese?
Brazil stretches over 3.28 million square miles. If you tried to fit Portugal inside of Brazil, there'd still be room for India, Argentina, Algeria, and Britain.

Across that much space, Brazil's particular brand of Portuguese has had room to evolve over time. The language has morphed with variations in indigenous populations, heavily influenced by the many different African dialects of slaves brought over since the 1500's.

Nowadays, are the differences so great that someone with a basic or textbook knowledge of Portuguese will find it difficult to understand regional dialects?

A Universal Language?

Though Brazilian people can trace their history back to Europe, Africa, and Latin America, the language tends to be fairly unified because of the popularity of telenovelas, or soap operas. This TV style's widespread popularity has led to an almost ubiquitous adoption of the dialect used in mass media.

The economic and cultural sway of both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro further encourages Brazil's citizens to pick up mass-market dialects. These days, many and urban Brazilians in particular can understand the formulaic language, both in speech and written word.

It's Not All Easy

But don't get too comfortable. Complete understanding may elude the foreigner who's received formal training in Portuguese when the spoken language often departs from what's written.

If you're visiting Brazil, be sure to familiarize yourself with the way Brazilian's speak. Foreigners will find regional differences in accent and conjugations of certain verbs, and due to Brazil's relative isolation within South America, speaking English and Spanish will only get them so far.

Although Brazilians use a much more formal language than in European Portuguese territories, many Brazilians in rural areas don't have access to formal education, meaning slang and colloquialisms have come to dominate over the years. Although in the big cities, you will find many Brazilians speak formally, if you venture to the lesser-visited areas where the population isn't accustomed to tourists, the dialect can vary greatly and communication can be a challenge.

Northern Dialects

Variations occur along geographical lines; you can separate the country's dialects into northern and southern groups. Northern dialects, used in the Amazonian (Amazonico) and Northeastern (Nordestino) regions tend to use open, pre-stressed vowels.

The Amazonian language dialect resembles European Portuguese, especially in and around the city of Belém. Pronouns are shortened, so você is typically reduced to cê (though seen in other regions of Brazil, in the Amazonian, this trend is more prevalent), and vowels are pronounced differently, as explained in-depth by Caleb Everett from the University of Miami.

There are many complex rules relating to how Northeasterns in particular pronounce vowels as well; for the general majority, open vowels are not exclusively used in stressed syllables. In the northern regions, including Amazonia, the vowels are nasalized in virtually all cases, while in the south fewer people make such a nasal sound.

Bahian (Baiano) Portuguese

Going back to its African roots, much of the Bahian dialect takes inspiration from those who migrated from Africa or were brought over as slaves.

If you're heading to Bahia, you'll find slang takes center stage and many of the words used are likely the antithesis of what you've been taught if you know some Brazilian Portuguese. For example, though the word "pivete" usually denotes "thief" around the rest of Brazil, it means "friend" in Bahia. Words like "bróder," taken from the English word brother, are also used to greet friends.

Abbreviations are likewise popular in the area. If you want to catch a bus, the driver is referred to as motô rather than the full word, which is motorista. Similarly, the fare collector will be referred to as cobra. Cobra still refers to the snake species, but in this case, locals use a shortened version of

Fluminense Portuguese

Fluminense Portuguese is most associated with the city of Rio de Janeiro and as such, although it contains a lot of slang, it is more closely related to the formal Portuguese language. When it comes to speaking the language, most words are said how they are written and in this way Fluminese takes influence from Portugal, Germany and France.

Fluminense is the dialect used on TV Globo, the most-viewed TV service in Brazil. The majority of the country's celebrities and journalists have adopted Fluminese, which helped the dialect become the most popular dialect in the country.

The only catch: many consider Fluminese too similar to the formal version of European Portuguese. Enthusiasts find it boring and other regions of Brazil dislike it in comparison to more flavorful local dialects.

Mineiro Portuguese

Prevalent only in a very small area of the country, in the highlands, the Mineiro dialect is one of the least spoken variants. Least like formal Brazilian Portuguese of all the dialects, it is not largely understood outside of the region.

Words are often merged more in this region, resulting in a faster pace of speech. A common question, para onde nós estamos indo? meaning "Where are we going?", changes to pronoistamuíno? in Mineiro.

Parallel, adjectives and nouns are often made singular; meus filhos, for example, meaning my children, becomes meus filho.

Sulina (Sulista) Portuguese

Sulina, or Southern Portuguese is spoken across the biggest region of Brazil, covering São Paulo up to Brazil's borders with Uruguay and Paraguay.

Like the Fluminense dialect, Sulina is more formal than those employed in the smaller areas, but unlike Fluminese, Sulina comes with its share of deviations from "generic" Brazilian Portuguese. Also known as Caipira, the language took its roots from Galician Portuguese and a Tupian Portuguese-like Creole language used by the Jesuits, with some Italian-influenced elements thrown in for good measure.

In Sulina, "l" is more commonly replaced with an "r" sound, while the word meaning no ( não) has two forms - não for short replies and num for negative phrases. As is the case with Mineiro, plurals are often replaced with singular articles or pronouns, while the adjective remains plural.

How Brazilian Dialects Have Spread

Because of migration from northern to southern states, the South has extended some sway over the languages of the North. It's important to note that dialects in Brazil tend to have cultural significance. People with a Gaúcho accent, for example, are proud of the fact and are not easily influenced by other regions.

Students of Portuguese should remember that there are distinctions between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Since colonization, the two languages have departed from one another, leading to differences in both pronunciation and grammar. Brazilian Portuguese has felt the influence of African and Amerindian languages, leading to independent development.

Tune In

Before you visit the Brazil, or if you're already in town for the World Cup, try catching up on some soap operas or listening to radio broadcasts from the region you're visiting. This will help you acclimatize to the accent, so you're more comfortable while abroad.

Whether you're on site or watching and listening from home, if the exposure to Brazil has you falling in love with Brazilian Portuguese, check out the World Cup-inspired language-learning programs from Language Trainers. Their qualified tutors have a special sensitivity to and lots of familiarity with Brazil's exciting brand of Portuguese!

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How Do Dialects Vary Around Brazil? #WorldCup - Listen & Learn USA

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When Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, does dialect variation across its vast territories make the local language easier or harder to learn? Do regional differences present language barriers to non-native speakers with only a basic understanding of Portuguese? Brazil stretches over 3.28 million square miles.

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Este link nos leva a uma página da internet que fala da história da língua portuguesa. Começando, explica as origens linguísticas do Português pertenece y as regiões do mundo que tem muitos falantes de português. Também fala dos diferentes dialetos que foram criados por a expansão da língua portuguesa que resultou em sua misturado com outras línguas.

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Portuguese, português or língua portuguesa, belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. It is a widely-spoken macrolanguage and one of the world's largest languages, ranking sixth after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic. Ethnologue estimates the worldwide population of first-language speakers of Portuguese at around 204.3 million people, while other estimates place the number at 215 million ( Nationalencyklopedin).

After the Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula, Vulgar Latin replaced the local languages. Along the Atlantic coast, it gradually evolved into Galician-Portuguese. After the incorporation of Galicia into Spain and the independent development of Portugal, it split into Galician and Portuguese.

In the 14th-6th centuries, Portuguese spread to many regions of Asia, Africa and America. By the 16th century, Portuguese had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa where it was used for colonial administration, trade, and communication between locals and Europeans. Some Portuguese-speaking communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia preserved the language even after they were isolated from Portugal. Some of the latter eventually developed into Portuguese-based creoles.

Status

Portuguese spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal created a far-reaching colonial and commercial empire spanning countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Today, Portuguese and Portuguese-based creoles are official, de-facto official, or co-official languages of Brazil (203 million), Portugal (10.8 million), Mozambique (24.7 million), Angola (24.4 million), Guinea-Bissau (1.7 million), East Timor (1.2 million), Macau (588,000), Verde Islands (538,500), São Tomé and Príncipe (190,400). Note that the above numbers are population estimates, not the actual number of first- and/or second-language speakers in these countries.

In 1986, Portuguese became an official language of the European Union (EU). In 1996, the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries (CPLP) was created to promote cooperation and cultural exchanges among the member countries and to create a Portuguese standard.

on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Portuguese is spoken in the U.S.

Dialects

Portuguese is a pluricentric language, i.e., one that has two standard spoken and and two standard written standards. There are two main groups of dialects: those of the Iberian peninsula (European Portuguese) and those of Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese). The differences between the two involve pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Portuguese varieties spoken in Africa and Asia are closer to those of Portugal than those of Brazil.

European Portuguese is divided into Northern and Southern varieties. The prestige norms are based on the Southern variety as spoken in the capital of Lisbon. The prestige norms of Brazilian Portuguese by-and-large follow those of European Portuguese. Although standard written Brazilian Portuguese was originally based on standard European Portuguese, there are differences between the two involving spelling, lexicon, and, to a lesser extent, those involving grammar.

Structure

Sound system

The sound system of Portuguese features a complex vowel and relatively simple consonant systems.

Vowels

Portuguese has the richest vowel system of all Romance languages. It includes monophthongs, diphthongs, and triphthongs, with some differences between the vowel systems of European and Brazilian Portuguese.

The two vowel charts below are based on Wikipedia. Nasal vowels are marked by a tilde. Nasalization is the result of the lowering of the velum, or soft palate, which allows air to escape through the mouth and the nose during the production of the sound.

Consonants

Stress

Primary stress may fall on any of the three final syllables of a word, but mostly on the last two. The final syllable is usually stressed when it contains a nasal, a diphthong, or a close vowel. Some vowels tend to change their quality in unstressed positions.

Grammar

The grammar of Portuguese is Latin-based. As a result, it exhibits many similarities to the grammar of other Romance languages.

Nouns, adjectives, articles, and pronouns

Portuguese nouns are either masculine or feminine. Masculine nouns usually end in -o, -e, or a consonant, feminine nouns usually end in -a. There are some exceptions.

There are no case markings.

There are two numbers: singular and plural. Plural is formed by adding -s.

Adjectives and pronouns agree with the nouns they modify in gender and number.

Definite and indefinite articles agree with nouns in gender and number, e.g., o carro 'the car' - os carros 'the cars', a casa 'the house' - as casas 'the houses,' um carro 'a car' - uns carros 'cars', uma casa 'a house'-umas casas 'houses'.

Prepositions contract with articles, e.g., de + o = do, de + a = da.

Verbs

Verbs agree with their subjects in person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and number (singular, plural).

Pronoun subjects are normally dropped since the verb endings carry information about person and number, e.g., canto 'I sing'.

There are three regular conjugations that can be identified by the infinitive ending, for instance, cantar 'to sing', comer 'to eat', rir 'to laugh'. There are also many irregular verbs.

There are three tenses (present, past, future). Compound tenses are formed with the auxiliary verbs ser 'to be' or haver 'to have'.

There are four moods: indicative, conditional, subjunctive, imperative.

Word order

The most common order in Portuguese is Subject- Verb-Object. Adjectives follow the nouns they modify, e.g., casa branca 'white house'.

Vocabulary

Portuguese vocabulary, for the most part, is derived from Latin with some borrowings from German, Arabic, as well as from Asian, Amerindian, and African languages with which Portuguese explorers and settlers came into contact. Today, English is the major source of borrowings, primarily in the area of science, politics, and technology.

Below are some common Portuguese words and phrases.

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Portuguese.

Writing

Written materials in Portuguese date back to the late 12th century. Literary works appeared in the 13th and 14th centuries. Portuguese is written with a modified version of the Latin alphabet which is given below.

Below are some notable features of Portuguese orthography:

k, w, y are only used for writing borrowed words, e.g., Darwin.

ç = [s], e.g., direção 'direction'

The letter h after consonants indicates palatalization, e.g., ninho 'child' is pronounced as [ninyo].

Brazilian Portuguese uses an umlaut over the letter ü to indicate diaeresis, i.e., that it is pronounced as a full vowel rather than part of a diphthong, e.g., freqüencia 'frequency'.

Acute accent over the vowels í, é, á, ó, ú and circumflex accent over â, ê, ô indicate that the vowel is stressed.

Grave accent over à indicates the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words, e.g., a + aquela = àquela.

Tilde over the vowels ã and õ represents nasal vowels before other vowels, at the end of words, or before a final -s. It usually coincides with the stressed vowel, unless there is an acute or circumflex accent elsewhere in the words, e.g., direção 'direction.'

-am, -em, -ém, -âm, -en, -én represent nasal diphthongs at the end of words or before final -s.

ou is pronounced as [o].

Modern Portuguese has two orthographic standards: one for Portugal, and one for Brazil. The most notable difference between the two orthographies is that in Brazil the first c in cc, cç, ct, and the first p in pc, pç, pt were eliminated since they are not pronounced. Below are some examples.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights in Portuguese

Declara ção Universal dos Direitos Humanos
Artigo1
Todos os seres humanos nascem livres e iguais em dignidade e em direitos. Dotados de raz ão e de consci ê ncia, devem agir uns para com os outros em espirito de fratemidade.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Did You Know?

English has borrowed a number of words from Portuguese. A few of them are listed below.

Difficulty

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Portuguese Language - Dialects & Structure - MustGo

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Portuguese, português or língua portuguesa, belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. It is a widely-spoken macrolanguage and one of the world's largest languages, ranking sixth after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic. Ethnologue estimates the worldwide population of first-language speakers of Portuguese at around 204.3 million people, while other estimates place the number at 215 million ( Nationalencyklopedin).

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Este link te leva a uma página da internet que nos explica a história da origem da língua portuguesa. E como um museu da história do português que começa com a origem da cultura indo europeia. Explica como a migração e expansão do império romano influenciam as línguas faladas em diferentes regiões.

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Hello, welcome!

We invite you on a journey: it is one of the many trips possible through the construction of the Portuguese language. Our tour begins around 4000 BC and goes until the 16th century.

Here you will find pictures, videos and texts which tell the dynamic and the changes that have led to the Portuguese language being spoken in many parts of the world today.

Changes do not happen immediately, even in restricted places. To consider this change we must take into account people, time, and diversity of cultures.

We hope you enjoy our tour, have a nice trip!

The (im)materiality of the Indo-European

It is believed that around 4000 BC a number of civilizations with similar dialects migrated to different regions of Europe, influencing both reality and communication in these places. This linguistic group is called Indo-European.

This does not establish a common origin for all languages, but enables some of comparisons that allowed this classification. More than justify that (im)materiality, the Indo-European demonstrates a common past to the inhabitants of the North and Northeast of Europe, far beyond the barriers that currently exist.

The similarity between different words from different places could imply the same linguistic ancestor. Even with words of non-Latin origin

Migration and Construction of the Archaic Latin

As time went by, cultures with similar dialects occupied almost the entire European continent. One of these groups concentrated itself on the Italian peninsula. The permanency of this group in one territory demanded and allowed fewer variations in its culture, especially in its common customs. This more similar culture shaped the Archaic Latin.

Spoken by a small group, the classical Latin represented the minority of the Roman Empire. Its speakers were members of the elite and of the power of the Rome region. The vulgar Latin instead was used by most of the population. The contact between vulgar Latin and local languages favored the origin of different and new languages.

Rome and the fragmentation of the Empire

Rome was the center of the Western world for several centuries. Its influence can be seen in the arts that served as inspiration for future generations, in the buildings across Europe, and also in its language. It is enough to observe the number of languages that has Latin as one of their roots (Portuguese, French, Italian, among others).

The variations of Latin, among other factors, may exemplify the inequalities and contradictions existing in the vast Empire.

This territory of large proportions, which had diverse cultures, and centralized only in Rome, faced its fragmentation in the early 15th century AD.

The long Arab occupation influenced the peninsula in all sectors: buildings were modified, different foods were introduced and consumed, new words were incorporated and reproduced, and a strong scientific development occurred.

Curadoria /Curators - Renato Silva dos Anjos e Marcos Paulo Amorim - Núcleo Educativo
Núcleo de Documentação Pesquisas e Exposições / Document, Search and expositions - Júlia Serra Y. Picchioni, Rafael Lumazini e Simone Vieira de Moraes.

The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.

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A journey into the portuguese language - Museu da Língua Portuguesa - Google Arts & Culture

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Hello, welcome! We invite you on a journey: it is one of the many trips possible through the construction of the Portuguese language. Our tour begins around 4000 BC and goes until the 16th century.