How similar or different is the Portuguese spoken by Brazilians to that of the people of Portugal?
Mostly pronunciation-“Portugal” Portuguese adds a “shh” sound to words ending in s. Also, the Portugal version retains many archaic words not used in Brazil. Some words are completely different, “dog”-for example (in Brazil “cachou”, in Portugal “cao”.
In Brazil, the typical Portuguese is viewed as a friendly, dimwitted guy…“Manoel”.
There are dialectic differences, for sure. Not only does Portugal retain some archaic words, as mentioned, Brazil has remnants of native dialects (no examples, offhand). In addition to the pronounced “sh” sound of Brazil (it’s also somewhat present in Portugal), Brazilians pronounce a ‘d’ at the beginning of a word like a ‘j’. So the word for ‘day’ becomes ‘jia’ (or ‘djia’, if you will), instead of ‘dia’. Also, a ‘t’ in the middle of a word can become a ‘ch’ sound; so the word for spaghetti (espaguete) becomes ‘espaguechi’.
Add to all this the fact that the Brazilians are much more effusive in the way they speak, as opposed to the tendency of the Portuguese to mumble inside their mouths. I had six months of intensive Brazilian training prior to being posted to Lisbon (scheduling issue), and was barely able to understand what people were saying.
In addition to what is mentioned above, Brazilians simplified the verbs. It’s not an official thing, but almost everybody speaks that way:
Brazilian
Eu vou
Você/ele vai
A gente vai (nós vamos)
Vocês/eles vão
European
Eu vou
Tu vais
Você/ele vai
Nós vamos
Vós ides
Vocês/eles vão
Brazilians have no need for tu, vos or even nós really. Nós is used quite regularly, but is frequently replaced with “a gente”, which is conjugated as você. It doesn’t really make sense.
As mentioned above, in Portugal they speak much faster and they don’t open their mouth properly. They spit a lot. It’s like machine gun fire. Brazilian is much softer, there are no harsh sounds. It’s a lot easier and far nicer to listen to. I have trouble understanding the Portuguese. The Africans are also much easier to understand.
ETA: a really funny thing was happening while I was living there: “tu” had become so archaic-sounding to Brazilians (associated with the language of the Bible) that it was being used as more formal by illiterate people. Same as “thou” for us.
Agree completely. At the embassy in Lisbon we had both Portuguese and former colonial workers (mostly those called the Mozambiquen Mafia). Most all of them were fluent in English, but when they spoke their native tongue, the difference was marked. I had a minor panic attack the first time my maintenance supervisor (who spoke no English) started telling me about problems with the ambassador’s house. It was like a completely different language from what I had learned. Since my American supervisor expected me to show up at post with some degree of fluency, I had to find another Portuguese employee to translate for me on the Q.T.
[Since the question has been answered, anecdotes are ok, right?]
In Brazil I worked with the this great Portuguese guy, he was really nice, forward-thinking and hard-working. Every Tuesday we would have our weekly meeting, every Tuesday he would talk for a while. Serious stuff that would really help efficiency and was motivating and eloquent. But it would come out like a machine gun. A big, smiling machine gun.
And at the end, every time, everyone would go: “right, what the hell did Rui say?” 
I have no problem with Cape Verdian or Angolan Portuguese though. They’re just sing-songy and they have lots of funny words, but I can follow it mostly. I find African French more difficult.
I also learned Francophone French :D. The teachers were African, the testers were Parisian :rolleyes:. One of them told me, snottily: “If I were not a teacher, I would have no idea what you are saying.” I told her that my teachers had no problem with my pronunciation or my grammer, to which she just gave a Parisian sniff. Bitch. Happily, I was being posted to Mali, where they understood me just fine.
I haven’t been to Portugal (but to Brazil), and my knowledge of Portuguese is limited to what anybody who ever learnt Spanish can understand simply on these grounds (which is, actually, a lot, at least in writing), but I’ve repeatedly heard and read that the differences are marked enough for publishers to commission separate translations of foreign books for the Portuguese and Brazilian markets. Certainly more pronounced differences than between the many varieties of English.
Portuguese is merely Spanish without all those pesky extra letters. Good day, sir! I said bom dia, o senhor!
I have a Brazilian friend who explains it like this: First there were Spanish people. Then all the illiterate farmers over in the corner separated and decided that the stupid way they spoke was a real language. Then all the stupid illiterate farmers there decided to move across the ocean, and when they got there decided that the way they spoke was just fine. That became Brazilian Portuguese.
I don’t know the accuracy of the representation, but it gives an idea of how Spanish relates to Brazilian Portuguese. Lots of letters left out, all the difficult stuff left out, then speak slowly and with lots of emphasis. There you go!
(None of this is intended as any offence to Brazilian Portuguese, it’s a much more beautiful language than Spanish, imho. And they people are the nicest in the world by a looong shot.)
Funny. I used to joke with my wife about the appearance and language of most Portuguese. My theory was that every time a child was born who didn’t fit the notion of beauty or handsomeness, that child was ostracized to live in a community of similar people. Eventually, as this community grew, it was forced southwestward, dropping off some of the more acceptable people into places like Andorra, the Basque country, Spain, and finally the remaining dregs were left with Portugal. We have dear Portuguese friends who I hope never read this. They are really a very friendly and funny bunch once you break into their inner circle, but that’s not an easy task as they generally present a dour and gruff facade.
Brazilian Portuguese uses some different words. For instance, in Portugal the phrase “O putinho levou uma pica ao rabo com um cacetinho na boca” would be normal, but in Brazil it would be quite pornographic. In Portugal it would mean that the little boy took a shot on his buttocks while holding a piece of bread on his mouth. In Brazil, however, it would mean that the little prostitute took a penis to his butt while he had another penis (we have a lot of words for that) on his mouth.
Other differences are, as it was already posted, the way we pronounce words. In Portugal it is way harder, and they use “older” grammar rules. The distance between Brazilian and Portuguese Portuguese is way bigger than the difference between American and British English, for instance, mostly because we had a lot of immigrants from all over the world - many Italians, Japanese, German and Spanish came here in the past. Now we have one of the biggest Japanese colonies outside Japan (and a crazy amount of sushi restaurants).
Another interesting thing is that depending on the region of Brazil that you are the accents wil also change, mostly because of the old immigrants.
I learned French in Cameroon, and I can speak to Francophone Africans all day long, but lord help me if I need to talk to French people. I remember my Peace Corps village would get the stray French tourist a couple times a year, and strange foreigners being a rare event, I was always eager to meet them and would grab lunch with them at our local restaurant. Most of the time, however, I’d end up chatting with the driver the entire time, because I couldn’t communicate with the French people.
I think a somewhat more accurate version of the story would state that, initially, there was Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula, as anywhere else in the Roman empire. The vulgarised Latin that people spoke in the streets differed from the classical Latin that people today learn in grammar school, and the various variants of vulgarised Latins differed among the regions of the Roman empire. Eventually, these variants evolved into languages, but on the Iberian peninsula the various languages into which they evolved (Portuguese, Castilian - which ended up being the standard variant of Spanish simply because Castile became the politically dominant region in Spain, Catalan, Galician, etc) were very similar to each other because they evolved from very similar variants of Latin. The variant of Latin spoken in Italy stayed closer to the original classical Latin than any other, which is why until today modern standard Italian is very close to ancient Latin.
Modern Standard Italian is not “very close to ancient Latin.” It may be closer to Latin than other Romance languages (although I’m not even convinced of that), but it’s not that close. All languages evolve, and no language is going to be mutually intelligible with its precursor from a couple of thousand years before.
Well, it depends on your definition of “very close”, so it’s a matter of taste. I do think that Latin and modern Italian are mutually intelligible in writing (due to a lack of living native speakers, we can’t say if this holds true in speech as well) to a considerable extent - I never properly learnt Italian, but I did a lot of Latin in school and I can read Italian quite well (although I must admit this may be a result of having done some Spanish and French). It’s also my impression that Italians who never learnt Latin do understand Latin texts to quite an extent when they read or recite them - which occurs, given the country’s Catholic tradition and the use of Latin in Catholic liturgy or the recital of prayers. Besides, Latin and Italian are not “a couple of thousand years apart” - modern Italian developed in the high Middle Ages, less than a thousand years ago. Italian and Latin are not further apart chronologically and linguistically from each other than Middle English and present day standard English, which are surely mutually intelligible to quite an extent.
I heard that doctors terms for genitalia in one are the vulgar term in the other.
Well that’s what a real live Portugesa said was the most problematic about the language differences.
I think Romanian is supposed to retain lots of features of Latin. (I speak Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and understand Italian, but don’t know Latin.)
And yes, of course Schnitte, your explanation is the GQ-version of where the languages came from. What my friend’s story is meant to do is give a feel for how the languages relate. Brazilian Portuguese feels like the illiterate farmer’s version of what was once Spanish, with added caipirinhas, bossa nova and barbecue.
This is getting off-topic, but… The major Romance languages all retain approximately similar “amounts” of Latin, but in different ways (some more in certain areas if grammar, etc.) Romanian, for example, was influenced by Slavic languages for some of its syntax. But it does retain some things not in, say, modern French.
I’ve read that the one modern language that truly retains a measurably higher degree of Latin is Sardinian, but IIRC it’s only spoken by a few hundred people. (This partly explains the high retention rate.)
Schnitte writes:
> Besides, Latin and Italian are not “a couple of thousand years apart” - modern
> Italian developed in the high Middle Ages, less than a thousand years ago.
Now you’re confusing things even more. The Italian of 1200 A.D. is not the same as the Italian of 2013 A.D. They are as far apart as Chaucer’s English and the English of 2013 A.D. You can’t (to create an example) divide a language X up into the language X of 1400 A.D. to the present, the language X of 800 A.D. to 1400 A.D., the language X of 200 A.D. to 800 A.D., and the language X of 600 B.C. to 200 A.D. and then say that language X was the same during each of these four periods and only changed at the breaks between periods. Yes, we talk about Old English and Middle English and Early Modern English and Late Modern English, but those are arbitrary divisions. English has always been changing. Latin/Italian has always been changing. All languages are always changing. Sometimes they change a little faster and sometimes a little slower, but they are always changing.