Howdy. For my birthday I received the book In Other Words. It is a collection of more-or-less untranslatable words, phrases, idioms, and proberbs.
In the Portuguese section is the verb se virar. The entry reads:
(Babel fish translates it as “if to capsize,” but “to capsize” doesn’t translate back into “virar.”)
Suppose, reasonably enough, that I don’t know how fix a leaky faucet. But I try anyway and end up being unable to complete the task. Recalling that se virar is a verb, how do I use it in this situation? Keeping in mind that past tense of the verb is not given so I naively add “ed,” do I say, “Boy, I really se virared that faucet!”
I’ll go out on a limb, not knowing Portuguese or how to conjugate the verbs. I don’t think he’s trying to imply it’s attested in English, but if it were how would you use it–or, how would the basic Portuguese use it? I’m guessing it’s intransitive, and his example would be “I tried to fix the faucet, but I [se virar],” the conjugated “se virar” then meaning “just did not have the know-how.”
Qick clear-up: I also own the same book as the OP. The words and phrases in the book are specifically not used in English (by contrast, see Tad Tuleja’s Foreignisms).
Attested? I don’t understand what that means in this context.
The words in the book are foreign words to be sure; they are words for things & concepts that we don’t have in English (to a greater or lesser extent). I think this word is great because it seems like there really is a need for it.
Yeah, not knowing Portuguese, (but knowing other latin root languages) it looks like “se virar” is the verb in its infinitive form. One would need to conjugate it and then use the proper reflexive. It might go something like tu te viras
A clue is the “se” coming before the verb “virar”. It’s more like “to empty oneself” than it is “to empty (a container)”.
It’s a reflexive verb. The Romance languages use reflexive verbs in many senses that are served in English by transitive verbs (cf. English “wash (one’s hands)” with Spanish “lavarse”.
It’s the same here. Portugese is using a reflexive construction to connotate what in English might, very roughly, be translated as “trying, but giving in” or “tinkering unsuccessfully”.
I let the thought unfinished for some reason. Anyway:
So you’re not "se virar"ing the faucet … you, yourself, have “emptied yourself”. You have exhausted your knowledge and abilities. Your best effort wasn’t good enough.
In other words, you wouldn’t use it with an object (the reflexive pronoun itself is an object, syntactically, though in actuality most “reflexive verbs” in Romance languages are not, semantically, reflexive.) It appears you’d just say, “Eu virei-me” (assuming the remains of my rusty Portuguese are worth anything), “I ran out”, with knowledge or ability being implied.