What language are they speaking at the World Cup anyway?

The 2014 FIFA World Cup has me enthralled.  What super athleticism  is shown by the players as they race up and down the pitch for ninety minutes or more and address the ball with amazing moves!   What rabid support is demonstrated by fans in the stands, dressed up in national costumes and painted in national colors! And what drama as the lead and hopes of a nation change in a split second with an unexpected goal!  

As if all of this is not enough to keep me well entertained, I have many questions about language. The Cup is an international event. There are players, coaches and officials from the five inhabited continents, symbolized by the Olympic Rings:  Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania/Australia.




How is everyone managing to communicate? 

My first thoughts on language use came while watching pre-match shows with commentators from around the world. Thank goodness for closed captioning.  The combination of different varieties of English and lack of familiarity with soccer terms had me turning up the TV volume and frantically trying to listen and read the lagging captions simultaneously.  I heard commentators speaking English with British accents, Scottish accents, Brazilian accents, Spanish accents, Dutch accents, and a few more I couldn't readily identify. 

Even more intriguing were the conversations on the pitch between referees and players and between players of opposing teams.  If body language is any indication, they had a lot to say to each other, but the question is what language or languages was the communication taking place in?

Could he have been saying "Moi?"

Probably no spoken language needed here!

Do you think this discussion was in meters or feet?

Whichever of the approximately 6000 existing languages in the world is being used at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, I'll bet the language is a lot more colorful than that written up in grammar textbooks.  Maybe if  I could learn to lipread, I could learn some very useful language!

   

Two hints for understanding Brazilian Portuguese

Hurray for the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) 'r' sound, I say!  I struggle with the trilled 'r' that is necessary to describe the picture above in Spanish as a  ferrocarril  (railroad), but I can produce the Brazilian equivalent estrada de ferro with no problem.

This is because in BP, a written 'rr' calls for a sound that is not a trill, but one that sounds very much like a strong 'h' in English, or the 'j' sound in Spanish.  Now that I can manage!  And I can use the same sound when a Portuguese word begins with an 'r'.

Just for a little fantasy, let's imagine ourselves at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, meeting Cristiano Ronaldo, the famous Portuguese soccer player.

A Brazilian making the introduction would pronounce the first sound in Ronaldo with a sound like the 'h' in 'heaven'.  If you are a Spanish speaker, you might imagine that his last name was spelled 'Jonaldo'.   A visitor from Portugal saying his name would trill the 'r' sound.  A Spanish speaker would immediately recognize  Cristiano's last name as Ronaldo.  And an American saying Ronaldo would make an 'r' sound like those in "red rabbit sitting on a rock". The Spanish and BP speakers would probably think, "Wow, what an American accent."  (Just kidding!)

So the moral to this story is, don't let that strong 'h'  sound  in BP fool you.  Here are a few practice words. 

rota  (route)

robô (robot)

regular ( regular)

roda ( wheel)  [No laughing allowed, Spanish speakers!]

rancho (small farm)

Did you resist the temptation to make a Spanish or English 'r' sound at the beginning?

Another tip about BP pronunciation is that there are certain consonants that Portuguese speakers do not like to hear as the last sound in words.  So they add a sound to the word like 'ee' in English to make a more pleasing sound to their ears.  Sometimes the extra sound can be seen in the spelling of the words.  English 'rink' becomes BP rinque; English 'jeep' becomes jipe.  

Sometimes you just hear the sound but don't see it written. English Walmart pronounced in BP has a 'chi' sound at the end, as does Internet. (You may remember from last week's post that in  BP 't' becomes a 'ch' before the 'ee' sound.  Whew!  Lots to remember!)

The addition of the 'ee' sound  results in some words that sound amusing to English speakers because we add the 'ee' sound to words as a sort of diminutive (similar to 'ito' in Spanish). 'Blanket' becomes 'blankie' when we talk to our two year old child.  'Sweet' becomes 'sweetie' when we talk to our spouse.  'Aunt' becomes 'auntie' if we like our relative.  A movie villain becomes a 'baddie' when we secretly admire him. But BP speakers are not adding any additional meaning to the words they end in an 'ee' sound; they just know it sounds better to them.  

I hope these two hints have made Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation a bit more accessible to you. To me,  it is well worth the effort of playing a few mental games to understand this melodious language.     

I speak Spanish. Why can't I understand Brazilian Portuguese?

As Brazil prepares to host the FIFA 2014 World Cup, and the 2016 Olympic Games appear on the horizon, I'm looking forward to hearing quite a bit more of the Portuguese language.  It may be a matter of catching just a sentence or two on TV before the English translator breaks in, but it is enough to remind me what a melodious, expressive language Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is.

Just to set the record straight, there are various dialects of Portuguese in the world.  Because Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, both in area and population, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is the dialect most frequently heard.

I have Spanish-speaking friends who tell me that they have tried, but just can't understand Brazilian Portuguese.  An interesting fact is that if you speak Portuguese, you can probably understand quite a bit of Spanish. However, if your language is Spanish, you may have some difficulty understanding spoken Portuguese at first. Reading is much easier in the opposite language.  So it must be the sound system that is interfering with listening comprehension.

Without going into a lot of phonetics and phonology (after all, the first match of the World Cup is already upon us), perhaps just a quick comparison between several sounds of the two languages will be of some help in understanding BP.

Spanish is considered a phonetic language; that is, for the most part, sounds have only one pronunciation. A Spanish 't' is almost always a Spanish 't'.    In BP, however, the 't' changes pronunciation rather dramatically in certain cases.  Take, for example, the word for 'mind', as in "I'm losing my mind."  The translation, mente, is written the same in both languages.

But oh the sound! Let's do this in two stages.  First take a look at the word 'Stop' in both Spanish and Portuguese.  

In BP, an 'e' at the end of words is pronounced higher in the mouth than in Spanish, like the vowel sound in the English word 'cheese'. Say pare  in Spanish and then pronounce it in BP ("paree").   

This different vowel sound at the end of words in BP can have important consequences.  A Brazilian Portuguese 't' takes on a new pronunciation when it comes before the 'cheese' vowel. The 't' changes into a sound like the 'ch' sound of English 'church'.   Spanish says mente as it is written, but BP says something like 'menchee' (like the frozen yogurt chain).  Try the same word out loud in the two languages.  Different, huh?

Now that you have been alerted to possible changes in the BP 't' sound, you are ready to tackle the 'd' sound. When a 'd' appears at the end of a word before that same vowel in English 'cheese', instead of making a regular old 'd' sound, BP makes a sound like the 'j' sound English 'judge'.  Try saying in Spanish the word for 'late' or 'afternoon', tarde.  Now say that same word in BP, something like 'tarjee'.  Got the idea?

I can't quite give up my former role as a language teacher, so how about a little practice test?  Say each of these words, first in Spanish, then in Portuguese.

abundante
lente
presente
potente
abunde
acomode

Did you make the 't's' and 'd's' with a different sound in BP because you pronounced the ending 'e' as 'ee'?

If so, you have made the first big leap into the mysteries of BP pronunciation.  More next week!

Still going strong with DuoLingo

I'm on a 20-day streak of using DuoLingo to maintain my knowledge of the Portuguese language. For someone like me, who likes to start activities but not carry through with them, that streak is remarkable.   DuoLingo is now included on my mental list of tasks I have to accomplish, not just things I want to do, on a daily basis.

I read recently that gamification is becoming an important part of education.  Before trying DuoLingo, I would have scoffed at that notion.  Now I am sold on the motivation that is built into the program. Getting points to move up to another level  keeps me hunched over an electronic device to do just one more activity. When I recently succeeded in making my first big move up to a new level, I felt like I had truly accomplished something. My husband Wayne just shook his head at my big news and probably secretly wished I would expend all that energy in the kitchen trying out a new recipe.

56 Lingots!  That's what it is in my virtual DuoLingo bank.  I'm ready to spend.  One option I've already splurged on is getting a heart refill in case I make an error.  Because you are only allowed three hearts per activity, and lose a heart every time you make an error, a  heart refill may keep me from having to redo a whole activity.

And it is easier than you may think to make an error.  Sometimes I really know the answer but just make a careless mistake (Yeah, sure!), sometimes I hit the 'Check' key by mistake before I am finished, sometimes I don't agree that my answer is wrong, and sometimes I really don't know the answer.  So heart refills are great helps.

When I first started using the program on my laptop, I would make a comment every time I thought Duolingo didn't have something quite right.  For example, I think "I gave a book to my friend" and "I gave my friend a book" have the same meaning and should be alternative answers.  I soon gave up those cyperarguments, however, because I wanted to spend my time racking up more points.  Life and language, after all, are never perfect.

Now, on to spending some of my Lingots.  Here is one option I may choose.

Idioms are expressions in languages whose meaning is more than that of the individual words used.  They are best learned as 'chunks' of information.  Idioms are a higher level language skill and may fool someone into thinking you know more than just textbook language.

Here is an option I probably won't choose as it would be of minimal use to me at my age, but then again, if might be kind of fun if I find myself in a bar listening to the Portuguese spoken around me.

And most important of all, is my Portuguese improving?  Yes.  Using DuoLingo has certainly started what Stephen Krashen call the "din in the head"; that is, I'm now hearing Portuguese again in my mind.

Oops.  Looks like I need to try for a few more points today.