So I said to this nice Brazilian girl, "How do you say “adios” in Portugese.
She replied “Adios, just like in Spanish.”
“Oh,” I riposted brilliantly.
“But, there’s also ‘ciao’,” she added.
“Ciao?” I asked suspiciously.
“Oh yes,” she responded sincerely.
“That’s the same as the Italian word,” I countered bilingually.
“It is?” she remarked a little surprised.
“Yes. Can you spell it?”
And of course she could. On a Post-it she printed, Tchau.
I’m Portuguese. I know the vast, grand canyon-like difference between how the Portuguese language sounds and how its written so the point of this anectdote is unclear to me. Are you saying that its interesting that this person doesn’t know how to spell the word or the fact that ciao is spelled differently in Portuguese (i have no idea if it is or not)?
What are you trying to say?
I’m pretty sure that BarnOwl point is that he (?) thought it was funny that this girl didn’t realize that ciao is originally an Italian word and presumably, has its own spelling Italian spelling.
Bulgarians say ciao, too. They spell it чау, which my counterpart (the Bulgarian English teacher I work with) would undoubtedly transliterate into Latin characters as “chow”, because she is only aware of Latin characters through English. Some of my students have Italian names and she’s taught them how to spell them in Latin letters phonetically in English. I have yet to convince one of my 4th graders that she ought to write her name as “Isabella” instead of “Izabela”, and my counterpart was baffled when I told one of my 2nd graders that her name should be written as “Francesca” instead of “Francheska”. (I know, it doesn’t matter that much, but that’s the predominant spelling, even among English speakers, and it just looks better to me.)
I believe the T in the beginning is to give it a harder sound. I’ve noticed that many of the Brazilians I know have trouble pronouncing certain sounds when the’re used at the beginning or end of words (i.e. pronouncing name as “namey” or smoke as “esmoke”).
I think it’s more of a compensation for a lack of the sound in their own language.
So do Bosnians/Serbians/Croatians, although I don’t know how they spell it…
Grim
What Kyla said. I wasn’t critiquing the Brazilian girl’s spelling at all. In fact I assumed she was spelling the word properly.
I thought it was cute that the girl (actually an adult young lady) was unaware of the Italian version. And now look. Ciao’s all over the place.
When I lived in Italy I picked up the habit of starting and ending communications with “ciao”. A Welsh friend (bear in mind Welsh is written phonetically) asked what this ky-a-o word was I kept putting on postcards ! She was perfectly aware of “ciao” just couldn’t recognise it from the spelling.
Incidentally I find it strange that in Italian “Ciao” is both greeting and farewell (altho’ some now go for “Ciao ciao” as the goodbye version) yet when adopted into other languages it seems generally only to retain the goodbye function …
It’s also used as a hipster greeting in Czech, spelled “čau.”