Two tears of dew fell into my hands when I caressed your face.
Poor me, I'm not worthy of aiding you in the misfortune, of deserving you in sorrow's way.
The reason for your crying you won't tell me. You don't have to say why, I can guess, in any case.
The unhappy lovers should have the courage to change their course.
By love, we give our souls, we give our body, we give everything until the journey tires us.
But when life calms down, what was love becomes nostalgia, and life is nothing, thus.
If you still can, keep your distance — silence your heart, kill the past, and smile too.
But if you can't, carry on.
So said my mother to me upon seeing me cry for you.
Showing posts with label Portuguese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Portuguese. Show all posts
Dança do Quadrado
I try to stay on top of internet memes and viral sensations across all the Romance languages, but, of course, it's impossible to review them all. Among the ones I have missed, there is one from Brazil: Dança do Quadrado (Dance of the Square).
The premise of the skit is that the three dancers perform the actions the song calls for, all within the boundaries of their own squares — no seu quadrado are the recurring words. It is certainly a good tool for anyone studying Portuguese, as the song goes through a lot of vocabulary, repeated quite a few times, with everything followed by no seu quadrado (in your square). All the way from pretending to be a seagull (gaivota) and a little macaque (macaquinho) to pushing (empurra) and pedaling (pedala) all no seu quadrado. Even references to pop culture that English speakers can easily recognize such as being a cowboy and the matrix in — you guessed it — no seu quadrado.
The premise of the skit is that the three dancers perform the actions the song calls for, all within the boundaries of their own squares — no seu quadrado are the recurring words. It is certainly a good tool for anyone studying Portuguese, as the song goes through a lot of vocabulary, repeated quite a few times, with everything followed by no seu quadrado (in your square). All the way from pretending to be a seagull (gaivota) and a little macaque (macaquinho) to pushing (empurra) and pedaling (pedala) all no seu quadrado. Even references to pop culture that English speakers can easily recognize such as being a cowboy and the matrix in — you guessed it — no seu quadrado.
Mudanzas
I recently discovered that a song in Spanish by the name of Mudanzas, popularized in the 80's by the Mexican singer Lupita D'Alessio, and covered by more artists in the last decade, was actually first recorded in Portuguese by the Brazilian Vanusa.
It was interesting to see that the translation to Spanish is almost identical to the Portuguese original, a linguistic freedom allowed with two closely related languages. One significant difference, however, is that the Portuguese song uses the verb mudar (to change) continuously as an alliteration to the song's title, Mudanças, delving into a metaphor concerning the actions of moving from an old house into a new one, and "moving" on in life, changing one's present. While the Spanish equivalent, Mudanzas, carries the same meaning as in Portuguese, the verb cambiar takes the places of mudar in practically all instances. Mudar does exist in Spanish, but its connotations differ from its Portuguese counterpart. Thus, in the Spanish translation of the song, we see no trace of mudar; and although the same metaphor is felt in both languages through the song title and the key verb (Mudanças/mudar, Mudanzas/cambiar), ultimately, we can apply the old saying here: some thing is "lost in translation".
Below is a comparison of the part that is spoken by each artist, about halfway through the song, showing the similarities (and differences) between the versions.
It was interesting to see that the translation to Spanish is almost identical to the Portuguese original, a linguistic freedom allowed with two closely related languages. One significant difference, however, is that the Portuguese song uses the verb mudar (to change) continuously as an alliteration to the song's title, Mudanças, delving into a metaphor concerning the actions of moving from an old house into a new one, and "moving" on in life, changing one's present. While the Spanish equivalent, Mudanzas, carries the same meaning as in Portuguese, the verb cambiar takes the places of mudar in practically all instances. Mudar does exist in Spanish, but its connotations differ from its Portuguese counterpart. Thus, in the Spanish translation of the song, we see no trace of mudar; and although the same metaphor is felt in both languages through the song title and the key verb (Mudanças/mudar, Mudanzas/cambiar), ultimately, we can apply the old saying here: some thing is "lost in translation".
Below is a comparison of the part that is spoken by each artist, about halfway through the song, showing the similarities (and differences) between the versions.
|
Portuguese
Hoje eu preciso
e vou mudar Dividir no tempo E somar no vento Todas as coisas Que um dia sonhei conquistar
Porque sou mulher
Como qualquer uma Com dúvidas e soluções Com erros e acertos Amor e desamor.
Suave como a gaivota
E ferina como a leoa Tranqüila e pacificadora Mas ao mesmo tempo Irreverente e revolucionária.
Feliz e infeliz
Realista e sonhadora Submissa por condição Mas independente por opinião
Porque sou mulher
Com todas as incoerências Que fazem de nós Um forte sexo fraco. |
Spanish
Hoy quiero
Y debo cambiar. Dividirle al tiempo Y sumarle al viento Todas las cosas Que un día soñé conquistar Porque soy mujer Como cualquiera Con dudas y soluciones Con defectos y virtudes Con amor y desamor. Suave como gaviota Pero felina como una leona Tranquila y pacificadora Pero al mismo tiempo Irreverente y revolucionaria. Feliz e infeliz Realista y soñadora Sumisa por condición Más independiente por opinión. Porque soy mujer Con todas las incoherencias Que nacen de mí. Fuerte el sexo debil. |
Monk Knight
My favorite fadista of all times, Mariza, sings this great poem by the Portuguese icon Fernando Pessoa. The poem itself is lyrical, and so lends itself for this fusion with fado that Mariza has recorded. The music video goes along with the mood of the mournful melody, and gives off vibes of quietness and relaxation. We are treated to a medieval image, reminiscent of the era which the poem attempts to take us into.
Mariza, born to a Portuguese father in Mozambique, moved to Lisbon at a very early age. The accent you hear in the video is, therefore, lisboeta — from Lisbon.
The actual poem follows, with my (literal) English translation.
Mariza, born to a Portuguese father in Mozambique, moved to Lisbon at a very early age. The accent you hear in the video is, therefore, lisboeta — from Lisbon.
The actual poem follows, with my (literal) English translation.
Cantigas de Santa Maria
From the English Wikipedia:
It is interesting to hear a language like this one being incorporated into modern music. For someone who already speaks Portuguese or Galician, reading through these Cantigas is akin to an English speaker reading works written in the English of the 1600's. Undoubtedly, when compared to the evolution of English, the orthographic and morphological changes seen in these Romance languages are not as radical, and one is able to read a document from the 1200's much more easily than one would read something written in English from that same time; peninsular Romance remained stable from early on in its history. Keeping in mind those time periods, there is a sense of archaic in each case — words and grammatical constructions that feel old and aren't used anymore, but we catch the meaning of what is expressed, and with a few footnotes here and there, it is understood with accuracy.
The Cantigas de Santa Maria ("Canticles of Holy Mary") are manuscripts written in Galician-Portuguese, with musical notation, during the reign of Alfonso X El Sabio (1221–1284) and are one of the largest collections of monophonic (solo) songs from the Middle Ages. All of the songs at least mention the Virgin Mary, and every 10th is a religious hymn.What brought my attention to these Cantigas is a German band by the name of Qntal whose work consists of songs with lyrics in Latin and a few other languages, like Galego-Português. They have taken several of these Cantigas, and recorded them in the band's enigmatic musical style.
It is interesting to hear a language like this one being incorporated into modern music. For someone who already speaks Portuguese or Galician, reading through these Cantigas is akin to an English speaker reading works written in the English of the 1600's. Undoubtedly, when compared to the evolution of English, the orthographic and morphological changes seen in these Romance languages are not as radical, and one is able to read a document from the 1200's much more easily than one would read something written in English from that same time; peninsular Romance remained stable from early on in its history. Keeping in mind those time periods, there is a sense of archaic in each case — words and grammatical constructions that feel old and aren't used anymore, but we catch the meaning of what is expressed, and with a few footnotes here and there, it is understood with accuracy.
Language Ambiguity
Some time ago, I came across an old discussion on the Antimoon forums in which forum goers talk about how spoken Greek resembles Spanish. The forum topic starts off with a poster saying:
This is an observation I had made myself for quite some time with regards to Greek and European Spanish, about how they indeed sound similar. What is of interest here is how two geographically distant languages give the aural impression of being much more closely related.
To exemplify this, I have selected an audio sample for each language, which you will find below. I reviewed about two minutes of each clip presented; coincidentally, all these clips come from the Ugly Betty adaptions in each country.
Spanish, the Spanish from Central and Northern Spain, to be specific, and Greek sound superficially similar not only because of a similar phonetic inventory, but also because of the frequent occurrence of certain phonemes in both languages. These two languages posses the same set of five vowels [a e i o u], and a similar syllable structure, with words ending generally in a vowel, usually [e] or [o], or [s].
A very important aspect that aids in this superficial similarity is that, in Greek, the quality of /s/ is pronounced in a similar fashion to the typical /s/ of Northern/Central European Spanish, a type of /s/ that the untrained ear may hear as [ʃ]. Common to both languages as well are the series of fricatives [θ], [x~χ], [ð], [ɣ], and [ʝ], among other shared phonemes (see Modern Greek Phonology on Wikipedia).
Regarding the quality of /s/ in Greek, H. Foundalis writes on his website about the Greek language, his mother tongue:
Moving on to another pair of a Romance language with a non-Latin one, all the arguments just discussed apply to European Portuguese and Russian as well. What is described above for Spanish and Greek has been exactly my experience regarding another Ibero-Romance language when hearing Russian in a crowded, noisy place: it sounds like European Portuguese. I get this anxious feeling of wanting to understand what is being said, but I can't; and I assume that I can't understand because of the noise. I have to get close and pay attention simply to confirm that it's Russian, doing this also as an experiment, about which I'm writing here.
In these languages, we find a high occurrence of [ʃ], the schwa-like [ɐ], the peculiar vowel [ɨ], and /l/ in a velarized or pharyngealized variety, [ɫ]. Not only that, but European Portuguese also shares with Russian unique consonant clusters, in Portuguese occurring due to the high frequency of vowel suppression.
As many (or few) may know, Modern-Greek and Spanish are similar in pronunciation [...].Someone in the forum links to this music video and asks others to listen to the song so that they can hear for themselves how similar Greek sounds to Spanish. I have to admit, that song serves as a prime example of the acoustic similarity of these two languages, making you feel as if you are supposed to understand what is being said, but you are unable to.
This is an observation I had made myself for quite some time with regards to Greek and European Spanish, about how they indeed sound similar. What is of interest here is how two geographically distant languages give the aural impression of being much more closely related.
To exemplify this, I have selected an audio sample for each language, which you will find below. I reviewed about two minutes of each clip presented; coincidentally, all these clips come from the Ugly Betty adaptions in each country.
Spanish, the Spanish from Central and Northern Spain, to be specific, and Greek sound superficially similar not only because of a similar phonetic inventory, but also because of the frequent occurrence of certain phonemes in both languages. These two languages posses the same set of five vowels [a e i o u], and a similar syllable structure, with words ending generally in a vowel, usually [e] or [o], or [s].
A very important aspect that aids in this superficial similarity is that, in Greek, the quality of /s/ is pronounced in a similar fashion to the typical /s/ of Northern/Central European Spanish, a type of /s/ that the untrained ear may hear as [ʃ]. Common to both languages as well are the series of fricatives [θ], [x~χ], [ð], [ɣ], and [ʝ], among other shared phonemes (see Modern Greek Phonology on Wikipedia).
Regarding the quality of /s/ in Greek, H. Foundalis writes on his website about the Greek language, his mother tongue:
[s], as in“soap”; a voiceless alveolar fricative. Actually, if you listen carefully to native Greek speakers, it sounds a bit between [s] and [sh] (probably because there is no [sh] in Greek, so the sound is somewhat shifted in the phonological space). However, to the native English ear it sounds much closer to [sh] than to [s], whereas every native Greek speaker would swear they pronounce it exactly like the English [s], unless forced to admit the difference by looking at spectrogram.The very same is true for the quality of /s/ in Northern and Central Spain, and Foundalis himself makes a remark about it: This is the way “s” is pronounced in Castilian Spanish (as opposed to Latin American Spanish).
| Greek | Northern/Central Spanish |
Moving on to another pair of a Romance language with a non-Latin one, all the arguments just discussed apply to European Portuguese and Russian as well. What is described above for Spanish and Greek has been exactly my experience regarding another Ibero-Romance language when hearing Russian in a crowded, noisy place: it sounds like European Portuguese. I get this anxious feeling of wanting to understand what is being said, but I can't; and I assume that I can't understand because of the noise. I have to get close and pay attention simply to confirm that it's Russian, doing this also as an experiment, about which I'm writing here.
In these languages, we find a high occurrence of [ʃ], the schwa-like [ɐ], the peculiar vowel [ɨ], and /l/ in a velarized or pharyngealized variety, [ɫ]. Not only that, but European Portuguese also shares with Russian unique consonant clusters, in Portuguese occurring due to the high frequency of vowel suppression.
| Russian | European Portuguese |
Ave, Aurora
Here's a poem composed in the 1800's by the Brazilian Antônio Lopes Castro. Written with the purpose of showing the affinity Portuguese has with Latin, this poem can be read in either of those two languages.
Salve, aurora ! eia, refulge !
Eia, anima valles, montes !
Hymnos canta, o Philomela,
Hymnos jucundos, insontes !
Quam pura, quam pudibunda
Es tu, aurora formosa !
Diffunde odores suaves,
Divina, purpurea rosa !
Es tu, aurora formosa !
Diffunde odores suaves,
Divina, purpurea rosa !
Eia, surge, vivifica
Pendentes ramos, aurora !
Aureos fulgores emitte,
Pallidas messes colora
Matutina aura, mitiga
Solares, nimios ardores;
Inspira gratos Favonios,
Euros, Zephyros protectores.
Eoa, Tithonia Diva,
Fecundos campos decora,
Canoras aves excita,
O serena, bella aurora !
Protege placidos somnos,
Inquietas mentes tempera,
Duras procellas dissipa,
Terras, flores refrigera.
Extingue umbrosos vapores,
O sol, o divina flamma !
Lucidas portas expande,
Tristes animos inflamma !
Salve, aurora ! eia, refulge!
Eia, anima valles, montes !
Hymnos canta, o Philomela,
Hymnos jucundos, insontes !
Portuguese spelling has been reformed since the writing of the poem, so it would look a little different if rewritten with today's standards, i.e. quam > quão; philomela > filomela; hymnos > hinos, and a few others (basically, the simplification of a number of graphemes, y > i; ph > f; th > t; ll > l; mm > m). Pronunciation-wise, there are differences as well, but, nevertheless understood, at least if read in Latin to a Portuguese speaker.
As explained in the article Consangüinidade Latim-Português by João Bortolanza (pg. 92 in a Brazilian university's magazine), the poem's author achieved his purpose by limiting the Latin verb forms to those of the second person singular imperative (canta, salve, refulge, protege, decora, excita, etc), and the present indicative form es, you are; and for nouns, using only the vocative singular (for feminine nouns like aurora, rosa, diva, etc.) and accusative plural (masculine and feminine nouns, which would end in -os and -as, respectively, and -es); all these forms are the same in Latin and Portuguese. Bortolanza also points out that the article had to be excluded completely, although it is very common in Portuguese but nonexistent in Latin. Bortolanza concludes this section by praising the author, Lopes Castro, and saying that it is no easy task finding common words in both languages, with identical roots and declensions.
AVE, AURORA !
Salve, aurora ! eia, refulge !
Eia, anima valles, montes !
Hymnos canta, o Philomela,
Hymnos jucundos, insontes !
Quam pura, quam pudibunda
Es tu, aurora formosa !
Diffunde odores suaves,
Divina, purpurea rosa !
Es tu, aurora formosa !
Diffunde odores suaves,
Divina, purpurea rosa !
Eia, surge, vivifica
Pendentes ramos, aurora !
Aureos fulgores emitte,
Pallidas messes colora
Matutina aura, mitiga
Solares, nimios ardores;
Inspira gratos Favonios,
Euros, Zephyros protectores.
Eoa, Tithonia Diva,
Fecundos campos decora,
Canoras aves excita,
O serena, bella aurora !
Protege placidos somnos,
Inquietas mentes tempera,
Duras procellas dissipa,
Terras, flores refrigera.
Extingue umbrosos vapores,
O sol, o divina flamma !
Lucidas portas expande,
Tristes animos inflamma !
Salve, aurora ! eia, refulge!
Eia, anima valles, montes !
Hymnos canta, o Philomela,
Hymnos jucundos, insontes !
Portuguese spelling has been reformed since the writing of the poem, so it would look a little different if rewritten with today's standards, i.e. quam > quão; philomela > filomela; hymnos > hinos, and a few others (basically, the simplification of a number of graphemes, y > i; ph > f; th > t; ll > l; mm > m). Pronunciation-wise, there are differences as well, but, nevertheless understood, at least if read in Latin to a Portuguese speaker.
As explained in the article Consangüinidade Latim-Português by João Bortolanza (pg. 92 in a Brazilian university's magazine), the poem's author achieved his purpose by limiting the Latin verb forms to those of the second person singular imperative (canta, salve, refulge, protege, decora, excita, etc), and the present indicative form es, you are; and for nouns, using only the vocative singular (for feminine nouns like aurora, rosa, diva, etc.) and accusative plural (masculine and feminine nouns, which would end in -os and -as, respectively, and -es); all these forms are the same in Latin and Portuguese. Bortolanza also points out that the article had to be excluded completely, although it is very common in Portuguese but nonexistent in Latin. Bortolanza concludes this section by praising the author, Lopes Castro, and saying that it is no easy task finding common words in both languages, with identical roots and declensions.
Vivo Por Ella, Vivo Por Ela
Bilingual songs aren't any sort of novelty. However, I am attracted to the combination of certain languages (Romance, of course), in particular, Spanish and Portuguese. While Spanish speakers can understand written Portuguese without much difficulty, they have a hard time doing the same with spoken Portuguese. Portuguese speakers, on the other hand, are able to understand both written and spoken Spanish quite well. Thus, the songs that will be reviewed in this entry can be thoroughly understood by a Portuguese speaker listening to them, even though about half of the lyrics are in Spanish. A Spanish speaker can follow along and understand most of the sung Portuguese, though he will a have harder time than a Portuguese speaker does with the Spanish.
Vivo Por Ella
Sung by the Italian Andrea Bocelli and the Brazilian Sandy, this song combines Spanish and Portuguese. Bocelli's Spanish pronunciation is recognized as European because he makes use of the /θ/ phoneme (otherwise /s/ in Latin America and a few regions within Spain), as in the words veces /'beθes/ and fuerza /'fwerθa/. Sandy's native Portuguese accent is Paulistano, from São Paulo; among other features traditionally Brazilian, she pronounces /s/ before a voiceless consonant as [s] (as opposed to [ʃ], a marked pronunciation feature colloquially known as chiado, common in Portugal and other parts in Brazil, but not São Paulo).
In the transcription of the lyrics below, the Spanish is marked by the color blue, and the Portuguese by the color green. There are a few parts in which both artists sing together in Spanish, and, at the end of the song, they both sing a line in Italian, marked with red in the text (this line is actually the original Italian name of the piece). The recurring word is vivo, I live, which is, as a matter of fact, spelled exactly the same in the three languages heard in the song, and pronounced very similarly as well: [vivu] in Portuguese, [vi:vo] in Italian, and [biβo] in Spanish.
It should be noted that what each singer sings isn't simply a translation of what the other has just sung; they each have their own verses, expanding and moving the song forward; the same is true for the other piece analyzed after this one below. For instance, in the third stanza, Bocelli begins singing the Spanish phrase es la musa que te invita (it's the muse that invites you), and Sandy completes it in Portuguese in the following line: a sonhar com coisas lindas (to dream of beautiful things); even a Spanish speaker has no problem understanding this particular sentence that combines both languages (undoubtedly, a Portuguese speaker understands it; see introductory paragraph).
Vivo por ella is Spanish for I live for her, which would be vivo por ela in Portuguese (and, as we can see in the penultimate line of the song, the same phrase is vivo per lei in Italian). We find out towards the end that it is música what they live for.
Vivo Por Ella
Sung by the Italian Andrea Bocelli and the Brazilian Sandy, this song combines Spanish and Portuguese. Bocelli's Spanish pronunciation is recognized as European because he makes use of the /θ/ phoneme (otherwise /s/ in Latin America and a few regions within Spain), as in the words veces /'beθes/ and fuerza /'fwerθa/. Sandy's native Portuguese accent is Paulistano, from São Paulo; among other features traditionally Brazilian, she pronounces /s/ before a voiceless consonant as [s] (as opposed to [ʃ], a marked pronunciation feature colloquially known as chiado, common in Portugal and other parts in Brazil, but not São Paulo).
In the transcription of the lyrics below, the Spanish is marked by the color blue, and the Portuguese by the color green. There are a few parts in which both artists sing together in Spanish, and, at the end of the song, they both sing a line in Italian, marked with red in the text (this line is actually the original Italian name of the piece). The recurring word is vivo, I live, which is, as a matter of fact, spelled exactly the same in the three languages heard in the song, and pronounced very similarly as well: [vivu] in Portuguese, [vi:vo] in Italian, and [biβo] in Spanish.
It should be noted that what each singer sings isn't simply a translation of what the other has just sung; they each have their own verses, expanding and moving the song forward; the same is true for the other piece analyzed after this one below. For instance, in the third stanza, Bocelli begins singing the Spanish phrase es la musa que te invita (it's the muse that invites you), and Sandy completes it in Portuguese in the following line: a sonhar com coisas lindas (to dream of beautiful things); even a Spanish speaker has no problem understanding this particular sentence that combines both languages (undoubtedly, a Portuguese speaker understands it; see introductory paragraph).
Vivo por ella is Spanish for I live for her, which would be vivo por ela in Portuguese (and, as we can see in the penultimate line of the song, the same phrase is vivo per lei in Italian). We find out towards the end that it is música what they live for.
| Bocelli: |
Vivo por ella sin saber Si la encontré o me ha encontrado. Ya no recuerdo como fue, Pero al final me ha conquistado. Vivo por ella que me da Toda mi fuerza de verdad. Vivo por ella y no me pesa. |
| Sandy: |
Vivo por ela eu também E não há razão pra ter ciúmes. Ela é tudo e mais além Como o mais doce dos perfumes. Ela vai onde quer que eu vá. Não deixa a solidão chegar. Mais que por mim Por ela eu vivo também. |
| Bocelli: |
Es la musa que te invita |
| Sandy: |
A sonhar com coisas lindas. |
| Bocelli: |
En mi piano a veces triste La muerte no existe Si ella está aquí. |
| Sandy: |
Vivo por ela que me dá Todo o amor que é necessário. Forte e grande como o mar, Frágil e menor do que um aquário. |
| Bocelli: |
Vivo por ella que me da Fuerza, valor y realidad Para sentirme un poco vivo. |
| Sandy: |
Como dói quando me falta |
| Bocelli: |
(vivo por ella en un hotel) |
| Sandy: |
Como sai quando me assalta |
| Bocelli: |
(vivo por ella en propria piel) |
| Both: |
Si ella canta, en mi garganta Mis penas más negras espanta. |
| Bocelli: |
Vivo por ella y nadie más Puede vivir dentro de mí. Ella me da la vida, la vida... Si está junto a mí... |
| Both: |
Si está junto a mí... |
| Bocelli: |
Desde un palco o contra un muro |
| Sandy: |
(vivo por ela e ela me tem) |
| Bocelli: |
En el trance mas oscuro |
| Sandy: |
(vivo por ela e ela me tem) |
| Both: |
Cada día una conquista. La protagonista Es ella también. |
| Bocelli: |
Vivo por ella porque va Dándome siempre la salida, Porque la música es así, Fiel y sincera de por vida. |
| Sandy: |
Vivo por ela que me dá As noites livres para amar. Se eu tivesse outra vida, seria Dela também... |
| Bocelli: |
Ella se llama música. |
| Sandy: |
E ela me tem. |
| Bocelli: |
Vivo por ella, créeme. |
| Sandy: |
Por ela também. |
| Both: |
Io vivo per lei |
| Bocelli: |
Yo vivo... |
| Sandy: |
E viverei... |
É é
From Language Hat:
So far, we have seen verbs in the present tense, but this is just as valid in the past; building from previous examples, we would have: eu queria era escrever, lit. I wanted was to write (o que queria era escrever, what I wanted was to write); ele tinha era inveja, lit. he had was envy (i.e. it is envy what he had).
In the future, this emphatic to be can be found along with the conjugated verb ir (to go) to form the periphrastic future: ele vai é ficar aqui, lit. he goes is to stay here (i.e. as for what he is going to do, he is going to stay here), as opposed to ele vai ficar aqui, he is going to stay here, with no emphasis or contrast.
While this construction is found in Spanish as well, it is not an extended feature, and in no way whatsoever has it penetrated the language the way it has in Portuguese; rather, its distribution is quite limited, regionally, like I stated; as an example, nonetheless: tengo es dinero, lit. I have is money, which can be said to be short for lo que tengo es dinero, lit. that which I have is money (i.e. it is money that I have).
The observation above lends itself for a discussion about a similar development in Portuguese and Spanish; similar in that we find two conjugated verbs in succession, one of them being the verb to be. Though it is not quite part of the formal language, it is rather common in Portuguese, found in Brazil as well as Portugal; in Spanish, it is not as common, though I have encountered it from Colombians, for instance, and Venezuelans. This verbal process makes use of an emphatic, and sometimes contrasting, to be, which is placed right after the main verb in a sentence. In other words, the conjugated form of to be emphasizes the verb it follows, in a construction that is ultimately an ellipsis of a more traditional structure; for instance, eu quero é escrever, lit. I want is to write, being just about equal in meaning to o que eu quero é escrever, what I want is to write (or that which I want is to write) with the o que (that which, or, what) being omitted. Some more examples are eu quero é diversão*, lit. I want is fun (i.e. with emphasis, it is fun that I want); eu quero é Deus*, lit. I want is God (i.e. it is God that I want); ele tem é inveja, lit. he has is envy (i.e. it is envy what he has). Although this emphatic structure is frequent with querer (to want) and eu (I), it is used with other verbs and the other personal pronouns as well. When used with ser (to be), it leads to the special case of two consecutive is's, é é, particularly in Brazil where the verbal system relies heavily on third person forms: você/ele/ela/a gente é (discussed before on my blog*). Thus, if the main verb is itself is, we end up with that double is: ele é é burro, lit. he is is dumb, which could be expanded to o que ele é é burro, what he is is dumb.IS IS, WAS IS.
For years now I've been noticing the increasing prevalence of the grammatically unmotivated doubling of is, as in "The thing is is that..." [...] I was recently watching a Nova program about the mission to repair the Hubble when I heard astronaut Mike Massimino say "My point was is..." [...].
So far, we have seen verbs in the present tense, but this is just as valid in the past; building from previous examples, we would have: eu queria era escrever, lit. I wanted was to write (o que queria era escrever, what I wanted was to write); ele tinha era inveja, lit. he had was envy (i.e. it is envy what he had).
In the future, this emphatic to be can be found along with the conjugated verb ir (to go) to form the periphrastic future: ele vai é ficar aqui, lit. he goes is to stay here (i.e. as for what he is going to do, he is going to stay here), as opposed to ele vai ficar aqui, he is going to stay here, with no emphasis or contrast.
While this construction is found in Spanish as well, it is not an extended feature, and in no way whatsoever has it penetrated the language the way it has in Portuguese; rather, its distribution is quite limited, regionally, like I stated; as an example, nonetheless: tengo es dinero, lit. I have is money, which can be said to be short for lo que tengo es dinero, lit. that which I have is money (i.e. it is money that I have).
Audio Problem
From the Unilang Portuguese Forum, I bring this Portuguese lesson: "How not to speak Portuguese" as it was advertised there.
Watch and hear the lesson
Apparently, the woman being interviewed, Ruth Lemos, had an audio problem which basically echoed her own voice and confused her a lot. It seems to not have been caused by a stroke or anything of that sort.
So if you're learning Portuguese, listen to her, but don't imitate her. ;-)
Besides, it's a good specimen of two Brazilian accents.
Watch and hear the lesson
Apparently, the woman being interviewed, Ruth Lemos, had an audio problem which basically echoed her own voice and confused her a lot. It seems to not have been caused by a stroke or anything of that sort.
So if you're learning Portuguese, listen to her, but don't imitate her. ;-)
Besides, it's a good specimen of two Brazilian accents.
Clitics And More Second Person
From a reader learning Portuguese, I received an email containing a few doubts regarding language usage:
Now, let's take a look at the sentence by parts. The first part, Não vem falar, is a negative imperative which, as you can see in Charts 7A and 7B of the article mentioned, uses the form of the second-person affirmative imperative. Prescriptively, the correct form should be Não venha falar, following the third-person morphology of você, the standard form of general address in Brazil; however, as I say in the article, in certain situations, some Brazilians maintain the formal/familiar distinction by using the prescriptive form in a more formal manner, while introducing forms from the second person in a rather familiar way. This is so that you have Vem falar in the affirmative, and Não vem falar in the negative, both following second-person morphology, even though this latter form in the negative should be standardly Não venhas falar, a construction not ordinary colloquially in Brazil.
Now, regarding whether seu, as in seus problemas, is used with familiar forms, the answer is again yes. Like I wrote: [a] sentence with teu may be followed by one with seu or vice versa, e.g. Não me diga que este não é seu carro. Ela já me disse que é teu. That is, the possessive generally used is indeed seu, even in familiar usage; again, unless it is a formal context, seu will always be perceived as "yours (sg)", e.g. Ele tem seu carro, in general speech, will always mean "He has your car", whereas "He has his car" would be Ele tem o carro dele [See De Nosotros]. However, for instance, in the same sentence sent to me, teus could have just as well been used, and no one would have noted anything out of the ordinary because this is exactly how the admixture of second- and third-person forms occurs, i.e. the sentence then being Não vem falar dos teus problemas que não vou ouvir.
The second part of the email reads:
As you can see, Spanish makes a more complex use of clitics, while Portuguese gets rid of all, or as many as it can. In the first example, in Spanish we have as a response "himself it he-ate" (i.e. He ate it), using the object pronoun plus reflexive se with the verb "to eat". In the Portuguese example, for the same response, we have "he-ate" (i.e. He ate it), with an empty object, a very common practice in Brazil, where all object and reflexive pronouns are displaced, with the verb by itself sufficing, in constructions where we would expect a series of clitics. Another possibility, as I have discussed it before, is to use what traditionally are subject pronouns as object ones, as in the second example: Eu perdi ele for more traditional Eu o perdi. The Spanish construction, se me perdió, literally "itself to-me it-lost" (I lost it), is difficult to translate into English as it is, and so the indirect object must become the subject, as it happens in the Portuguese rendition; and even though its equivalent perdeu-se-me is gramatically correct, it would be hard to find it in Brazil. My advice to my reader: if you find yourself in, say, a supermarket in Brazil, and you drop your box of cheeses, and you suddenly yell out "A caixa caiu-se-me!", be ready to receive some weird looks, and you might be even be sent to the 'pedantry' aisle. An interesting observation here is that if you speak Portuguese following the European standard, and hence speak it with a European accent (like I do), you are expected to use this kind of intricate constructions regarding the clitics; thus, if you are in this position, and say something like A caixa caiu-se-me, you won't get the same reaction than if you speak the language following the Brazilian standard, because it is known that clitic pronouns are used differently in each country (i.e. Portugal and Brazil), especially in colloquial registers.
The reader ends his email by saying:
Hi! I'm mexican and I found this page helpful for those learning Romance Languages. I've been learning portuguese by my own without the necessity of assisting to classes. I don't know if this is the right place where I can ask doubts. Anyway, in Brazilian Portuguese, when you talk to a friend you talk to him informally obviously. But for example, I heard a sentence saying "Nao vem falar dos seus problemas que nao vou ouvir". The sentence is in informal form but the word "Seu" can also go accompanied with the informal??The answer is yes. First of all, I refer the reader to my article Second Person in Portuguese, which deals with this exact matter and more.
Now, let's take a look at the sentence by parts. The first part, Não vem falar, is a negative imperative which, as you can see in Charts 7A and 7B of the article mentioned, uses the form of the second-person affirmative imperative. Prescriptively, the correct form should be Não venha falar, following the third-person morphology of você, the standard form of general address in Brazil; however, as I say in the article, in certain situations, some Brazilians maintain the formal/familiar distinction by using the prescriptive form in a more formal manner, while introducing forms from the second person in a rather familiar way. This is so that you have Vem falar in the affirmative, and Não vem falar in the negative, both following second-person morphology, even though this latter form in the negative should be standardly Não venhas falar, a construction not ordinary colloquially in Brazil.
Now, regarding whether seu, as in seus problemas, is used with familiar forms, the answer is again yes. Like I wrote: [a] sentence with teu may be followed by one with seu or vice versa, e.g. Não me diga que este não é seu carro. Ela já me disse que é teu. That is, the possessive generally used is indeed seu, even in familiar usage; again, unless it is a formal context, seu will always be perceived as "yours (sg)", e.g. Ele tem seu carro, in general speech, will always mean "He has your car", whereas "He has his car" would be Ele tem o carro dele [See De Nosotros]. However, for instance, in the same sentence sent to me, teus could have just as well been used, and no one would have noted anything out of the ordinary because this is exactly how the admixture of second- and third-person forms occurs, i.e. the sentence then being Não vem falar dos teus problemas que não vou ouvir.
The second part of the email reads:
And also there is another little doubt. Let's say that someone is carrying something and falls from his hands. In Spanish you would say "se me cayó" if you are the one that threw it, "se te cayó" if you are the witness, etc. In portuguese would be the same?: "Se me caiu", "Se te caiu", etc.That construction is not truly found in Brazil. In Portugal, it is possible to hear caiu-se-me or caiu-se-te, but is not as frequently used as in Spanish. In Brazil, that particular Spanish construction of the type se + ind. obj. pron. (i.e. se me, se nos, se les, etc), will normally be rendered in a non-reflexive way, shifting the indirect object to occupy the subject position. For instance, the phrase in Spanish, using the construction in question, se me cayó la caja would have the gramatically correct equivalent in Portuguese caiu-se-me a caixa, which, as I say above, could be found in Portugal, especially in more formal situations, though in Brazil it would most likely be rendered as a caixa caiu or even eu deixei cair a caixa. This is something Spanish speakers must get used to because Spanish possesses rich usages of pronoun clitics, with multiple ones ocurring frequently. On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese tries to use the least number of clitics possible to convey the intended meaning. Let's a compare a few sample discourses and their equivalents:
| Spanish | Portuguese |
| -¿Se comió la sopa? -Sí, se la comió. | -Ele comeu a sopa? -Sim, comeu. |
| -¿Dónde está tu libro? -Se me perdió. | -Onde está seu livro? -Eu perdi ele. |
As you can see, Spanish makes a more complex use of clitics, while Portuguese gets rid of all, or as many as it can. In the first example, in Spanish we have as a response "himself it he-ate" (i.e. He ate it), using the object pronoun plus reflexive se with the verb "to eat". In the Portuguese example, for the same response, we have "he-ate" (i.e. He ate it), with an empty object, a very common practice in Brazil, where all object and reflexive pronouns are displaced, with the verb by itself sufficing, in constructions where we would expect a series of clitics. Another possibility, as I have discussed it before, is to use what traditionally are subject pronouns as object ones, as in the second example: Eu perdi ele for more traditional Eu o perdi. The Spanish construction, se me perdió, literally "itself to-me it-lost" (I lost it), is difficult to translate into English as it is, and so the indirect object must become the subject, as it happens in the Portuguese rendition; and even though its equivalent perdeu-se-me is gramatically correct, it would be hard to find it in Brazil. My advice to my reader: if you find yourself in, say, a supermarket in Brazil, and you drop your box of cheeses, and you suddenly yell out "A caixa caiu-se-me!", be ready to receive some weird looks, and you might be even be sent to the 'pedantry' aisle. An interesting observation here is that if you speak Portuguese following the European standard, and hence speak it with a European accent (like I do), you are expected to use this kind of intricate constructions regarding the clitics; thus, if you are in this position, and say something like A caixa caiu-se-me, you won't get the same reaction than if you speak the language following the Brazilian standard, because it is known that clitic pronouns are used differently in each country (i.e. Portugal and Brazil), especially in colloquial registers.
The reader ends his email by saying:
I think that would be all and please let me know if I can refer to you again if I have any other doubt. Thank you! David M.Absolutely. Anyone with any language doubts about the Romance languages, feel free to contact me with them, and if I find them proper and my time permits it, I will gladly attempt to answer them in Romanika.
Second Person In Portuguese
There is a phenomenon related to the semantic second-person in Portuguese. There is a series of clitics and obliques associated with uncorresponding subject and, at times, verb forms. It is not limited to Brazil or Portugal alone, it occurs in both countries, though realized in different ways. These are assymetrical uses, so to speak, if we follow the prescriptive grammar. Nonetheless, many of these have become generalized as standard in each country and are so freely used. We'll take a look at how these pronominal systems have become innovated, having moved aside distinctions found in the paradigms as derived from Latin and bringing in new ways to render them.
All these inovations involve the second-person being, in one way or another, matched up with the grammatical third-person.
The main reason for all this begins with the introduction of Vossa Mercê as a mode of polite direct address. Vossa Mercê (Your Mercy) was just one of several ways of formal address that developed over centuries in Portuguese, having parallels with the other Iberian languages (i.e. Spanish Vuestra Merced). This type of address was used with third-person morphology, hence creating a 'distance' between the speaker and the interlocutor. The direct address went from tu in the singular and vos in the plural in Latin (See Chart 1A), yielding the forms tu and vós in Portuguese, with a full formal/familiar distinction with tu as familiar, and vós as both singular formal and plural, this last one with no distinction between formal or familiar, as in modern French (Chart 1B). As these forms became too common with the populace, new polite forms began to emerge using a possessive and third person forms. Among the most significant ones are Vossa Excelência (Your Excellency) and Vossa Mercê (Your Mercy). Though several of these new forms were used at one time, Vossa Mercê became the most commonly used. Having won out, it went through several intermediate stages, including Vossemecê, Vossmecê, Vomecê, and Vomcê, until it was standardized as você (though now, particularly in Brazil, the evolution has continued to ocê, cê). The plural polite form followed the singular, and on this model it was standardized as vocês (Chart 1C).
However, it doesn't stop here. The newly introduced synthetic forms did not completely displace the old forms. As of now, the two systems coexist, not as two, side by side, but as one, complexly intermingled.
Brazil
In Brazil, as I have stated on previous posts, the grammatical second person pronouns and their verbs forms have disappeared from the written and spoken languages, though these can often be seen in poetry and religious texts. Indeed, they have become archaisms for the vast majority of Brazilians. Chart 2 shows the second-person paradigm, standard in Brazil today.
Chart 2
A third category can be defined here, besides the familiar and formal: highly formal. In a highly formal situation, o senhor and a senhora are expected, or, especially in writing, Vossa Excelência, though this last one is the least common of all. Other than that, você is used in all situations (not everywhere though, as it will be seen). As you will see below, the current system of oblique pronouns in Brazil is somewhat of a hybrid, coming from the Second- and Third-Persons. I have listed você as third-person nominative because, as I stated, even though it is understood as second-person, it is gramatically third-person, thus, it uses the forms corresponding to "he/she/it", ele/ela.
3C. Second-P. Singular Address System Current in Brazil
Charts 3A and 3B show the third and second subject (nominative) forms, followed by their corresponding oblique cases: direct object (accusative), indirect object (dative), reflexive, possessive (genitive), and last one named prepositional, where I list the forms which occur after most preprositions, including how it contracts with the preposition com, hence in 3A, the form does not contract, whereas in 3B, it does. When used reflexively, the third-person prepositional forms become si and consigo (notice the contraction with com), respectively.
Chart 3C shows the second-person singular paradigm, in which are found forms from the original second- and third-persons, current and standard in Brazil. The underlined forms in 3C are the ones that have penetrated into what was originally solely third-person. The language professors may still follow the original scheme, as in 3A, but in reality, the paradigm as in 3C is used at all social levels, from the man in the street to the college graduate. This is what feels instinctive to Brazilians, even if through school they learn and use the system in 3A, which may appear, for instance, in the language section of college entrance exams. As an example, I will cite the now famous slogan used in Brazil for an AIDS prevention campaign: Se você não se cuidar, a AIDS vai te pegar (If you don't take care of yourself, AIDS will get you). Here we see the subject (você), the reflexive pronoun (se), and the verb (cuidar), all of which are third-person. In the second part, however, we see te, which is grammatically second-person, used with the other pronouns which are third-person, together mixed to reference semantically second-person. Like I said, this is a standard practice in Brazil (not in Portugal). If this same sentence had been said instead: Se você não se cuidar, a AIDS vai o pegar, that is, with the scheme as in 3A, in which all pronouns are third-person, the reaction from the public would not have been the same. Brazilians see the scheme in 3A as being too 'scholarly', too formal, and even, quite pedantic. In order to connect with the people, 3C had to be used, which is what is said everyday in Brazil. If anything, as an alternative, without 'mixing' the grammatical persons, te could have been avoided, and, in its place, another você could have been used, only this time, after the verb: Se você não se cuidar, a AIDS vai pegar você, leading us into yet another pronominal paradigm living side by side the one we have just been looking at.
Chart 3D
In 3D, we can see the reduction of the forms, even of those from the original second-person (te), with an abundance of você: você has abandoned its role as a pure subject pronoun and moved on to serve other grammatical uses. The two forms marked with asterisks, the reflexive and possessive, are rare, though I have recorded instances of their existance. First, seu, in Brazil, is explicitly taken to mean "yours (sg.)". So while there may be ambiguity on whether a certain seu means "hers, his, yours (sg.), yours (pl.), theirs", unless reading some sort of formal text, seu will always be perceived as "yours (sg.)", e.g. Ela vendeu sua casa (She sold your house); therefore, the locution de você is not truly necessary as are other persons (i.e. dela, dele, etc.)1. The você used as a reflexive pronoun, the rarest possible form, is attested in phrases such as Registre você! (Register yourself!) for the usual Registre-se (or, as it's common in Brazil to prepose the pronouns, Se registre), and Veja você! for Veja-se.
The more significant forms are those used to serve as accusative and dative, which have played a major role in the Brazilian standard. In the third-person, the accusative in Brazil is no longer marked with the corresponding pronouns as we see them in 3A (o/a). Surely, they can be found in certain types of writing, but for the average Brazilian, these seem too superficial. As you can see in 3D, the direct-object form is identical to the subject one, in a phenomenon ocurring with all third-person pronouns, and even extending to other persons at times. In the direct address, te preposed to the verb, or, você postposed to it, will convey a direct object; the choice to use either one generally has to do with euphony, though emphasis and style can play a part in this, or an individual may employ both indiscriminately. An as example, let's take the two ways of saying "I love you" which are most frequently heard in Brazil: Te amo and Amo você. This shows, in a clear way, what I have just stated about direct objects in the same way than the AIDS slogan above. The first example, Te amo, uses the form presented in Chart 3C, a mixture between the originial second- and third-person paradigms; also notice here how the object pronoun is placed before the verb. In Amo você, we see in action the system in Chart 3D: the direct object has the same form as its subject form, only postposed to the main verb. If we add to this the fact that the other grammatical persons are involved as well, we end up with a word order that is much stricter and rigid. Even though in Portugal, in certain clauses and interrogatives, after prepositions or relative pronouns, the subject tends to be placed after the verb, in Brazil, the subject is always fixed before the verb, because, as we have seen, the same form could play different functions (subject, object). Therefore, while in Portugal we would hear Como se chama você?, in Brazil we would hear Como você se chama?, and even though both constructions would be understood in either country, each country uses its own construction standardly. However, there could indeed be instances in Brazil where the placement of the pronoun would change the meaning completely. Let's take the phrases: Não sei quem você viu and Não sei quem viu você. Here, we see você in two different places, after and before the verb. In Portugal, as I said, it would be customary to place the subject after the relative pronoun, though both phrases would be understood as being the same: I don't know whom you saw. In Brazil, nonetheless, due to what has just been discussed, the two phrases could convey two different ideas. The first phrase could be analyzed as: quem as the object of the second clause, você as its subject, and viu as the verb (with você as the subject); thus, meaning, "I don't know whom you saw". The second phrase, however, because of its word placement, could be analyzed by a Brazilian as: quem as the subject of the second clause, viu as its verb, and você as its direct object; thus, meaning, "I don't know who saw you". Two complete different things2.
With the indirect object, something similar occurs. That is, the form corresponding to the subject appears as the object one, in this case, the indirect object as well. In Chart 3D, we see again that the pronoun from 3C is replaced by a variation of the subject form: você preceeded by pra, a reduction of para (to, for). Here, I use pra and not the more formal para because it's the former that is becoming generalized 3. This construction is commonly employed to replace the usual lhe as a direct object pronoun when this last one is emphasized, in which case it becomes a + pronoun. In this case, it would then be: Vou perguntar-lhe algo » Vou perguntar algo a você. Para, in some cases, can be used instead of a, and in Brazil, para, or rather pra, is preferred over a for nearly all cases. So that instead of Vou perguntar-lhe algo, one would hear Vou perguntar algo pra você. Thus, lhe is generally displaced by te or pra você, as can been in Chart 3D.
If we look at these things from the perspective of prescriptive grammar, the correct forms should be: Amo-o (or Amo-a) instead of Amo você, if one talks to the person using você; Amo-te instead of Te amo, if one talks to the person using tu. Amo-o for a Brazilian does not flow well; neither would (Eu) o amo, with the object preposed to the verb. This would feel, like I said, too superficial, unnatural to a native Brazilian. Tu, as we saw above, has disappeared from the standard everyday language in Brazil, therefore, prescriptively, we should not find te at all here. The Brazilian, nonetheless, would say either Te amo or Amo você to express the same emotion. This principle of assimilating the oblique forms to the subject applies to the other persons as well, as I have stated. The prescriptive paradigm for the true third-person singular (i.e. not direct address) is that of Chart 3A, except that the subject and prepositional forms would involve ele (he) or ela (she). Thus, in the spoken language, instead of Ele a ama, we would find Ele ama ela (He loves her), which would be different from Ela ama ele coming from Ela o ama (She loves him). We see here again that the object pronouns are displaced by their subject forms; it's word order that tells us whether a particular pronoun is being used as subject or object. The plural walks right along the singular, following the same pattern (thus, ele conhece vocês (He knows you [pl.]) and ele conhece eles (He knows them) for ele os conhece). In the first person, eu (I) may displace its own oblique forms, so that we may find, for instance, você viu eu (You saw me) for standard Você me viu. Nós (we) and its oblique forms are frequently displaced by a gente. Hence, instead of Nós trabalhamos muito and Ela nos viu, it is common to hear A gente trabalha muito and Ela viu a gente. A gente, as you can see, is treated as third person (like você) even though it is used to reference the plural first person. This further reduces the morphological verb endings that differientiate each grammatical person from six in most tenses to three (four if we consider nós)4. Taking the verb falar (to speak) as example, we have:
All of this puts Brazilian Portuguese, particularly colloquially, on the verge of being non-prodrop (whereby the subject pronouns are required in conjunction with the verb to convey proper meaning). Even in formal writing, the subject pronoun você is always maintained, and hence nearly never dropped. To express "You are", for instance, the verb by itself will not suffice; it must be used with the pronoun. If a third-person verb form is used without an explicit pronoun, either there will be confusion, or, it will be understood as an impersonal form. This is especially true of certain verbs and tenses, like that of tem (from ter, to have), for example, which in Brazil has ousted há in the sense of "there is/are". Tem, when used without a pronoun, is understood as this impersonal construction. Tem meninos aqui? does not mean "Do you have children here?" nor "Does he have children here?", rather, because there is no pronoun present, it means "Are there any children here?". To express the other two frases, the pronoun needs to be explicitly used, otherwise the meaning changes altogether, i.e. Você tem meninos aqui?, Ele tem meninos aqui?. This occurs, of course, due to the fact that the same verb form is used in all of these cases: third person. In English, do you know whom I'm referring to if I simply say "are good"? No, because the subject could be "we", "you", or "they". This is why the subject is obligatory. In (Brazilian) Portuguese, even though other verb forms remain distinctive (eu, nós), the subject pronoun tends to be used, it would seem as though by analogy with the third person, so that one may hear or read: Eu vim porque eu quis. E eu vou partir quando eu quiser (I came because I wanted to. And I will leave when I want to). This last sentence can be perfectly understood without any of the eu's, and for someone who is not used to it, this may seem overwhelmingly emphatic.
In some regions in Brazil, all of this goes even further: the third-person verb forms are used with even more grammatical persons. In many places of Southern Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro and the southern states, a survival of tu is attested. Indeed, the same tu that is no longer used in the rest of Brazil, and the same that is very alive in Portugal. There is one difference, however: even though tu is indeed second-person, it is used with third-person morphology. That is, what survives is not the standardly tu és, as used in Portugal, but, rather, tu é: tu followed by a verb in the third-person, the same form used with você, i.e. tu fala for (tu) falas, tu vem for (tu) vens5. This is sometimes attributed to the loss of final «-s», a phenomenon having ocurred in other languages, such as French and some Spanish dialects. Also noted is the loss of the morphological plural marker, «-s», throughout parts in Brazil, e.g. os livro grande for standard os livros grandes. These realizations are quite accepted at all levels in these regions (except probably in highly formal situations, and in language class!), even though these people are aware of "not using the right conjugation", to put it in their words. This theory of the loss of final «-s» makes senses when we look at the tenses in which only an «-s» distinguishes the second- and third-person singular verb forms from each other, e.g. falas (2nd p.) vs. fala (3rd p.); however, it breaks down when we look at the preterit, where the two forms are quite distinct: falaste vs. falou. In this case, there is no sole «-s» separating the two. In these regions, what we actually hear is tu falou, undoubtedly with third-person morphology, instead of (tu) falaste, where both pronoun and verb are second-person. I put the second tu in parantheses because the verb ending tells us that it is second-person singular, in the preterit, and therefore, not required. However, in the first one, tu falou, the tu is just as important as the verb and is always used, in much the same way than in French (i.e. tu parles, tu viens), where too the unique verb inflection identifying the second-person singular is no longer present (in pronunciation, that is). Sometimes, particularly in the more Southern states like Rio Grande Do Sul, people will use the correct conjugation with tu, though this practice is often regarded as pedantic. Even more, nonstandard forms exist, such as falastes with an extra «-s»6, and falasse, where the «t» has assimilated to the following «s». And even when tu is used with verb agreement, the pronoun itself will generally not be dropped, following the previous models, though the person can be devised from the ending; thus, we may hear: Tu tens que vir porque tu deves fazer o que tu não fizeste [or fizesse] (You must come because you must do what you haven't done). This same sentence without verb agreement, which is what more often is heard, and where the pronoun is required, would be: Tu tem que vir porque tu deve fazer o que tu não fiz (cp. the same in French). The corresponding oblique cases used with this are those of the second-person, as in Chart 3B. The reflexive, however, in some regions, like Rio De Janeiro, is se, and in others, like Rio Grande Do Sul, it is te; also, in some parts and some speakers, both você and tu are employed, at times, even in the same utturance. In the Southernmost states, all forms, including the reflexive, belong to the second-person, exactly as in Chart 3B, all of which are employed with verbs in the third-person. In these regions where tu is present, there exists somewhat of a formality attached to using você, with tu being considered more familiar and você being more formal, a formality which is absent in the rest of Brazil, though the distinction between the two is more or less parallel with that found in Portugal and other Romance languages. Chart 4 summarizes these points.
Chart 4
Yet another system in Brazil, which will properly be labeled ocassional, exists, which many some Brazilians will use in given situations. Você is nearly always kept as the subject, with the oblique forms being taken from the second-person, similar to the system just discussed. These people will generally resort to this paradigm to avoid ambiguity, or to emphasize something (or they may just feel like resorting to it!). The reflexive, possessive, and the already established direct and indirect object pronouns of the second person, will emerge even in regions where tu is absent in its subject form (e.g. São Paulo), as we can see in Chart 5.
Chart 5
You can see here that this is similar to the paradigm in Chart 3C, with você as subject, se as reflexive, now with the possessive and prepositional forms, besides the direct and indirect object ones, coming from the second-person. Again, this is used ocassionally by people who generally do not have tu as a subject, instead having the scheme in Chart 3C as their main one. The same that applies above to the alternation of some forms applies here as well, where, for instance, a sentence with teu may be followed by one with seu or vice versa, e.g. Não me diga que este não é seu carro. Ela já me disse que é teu. (Don't tell me this isn't your car. She already told me it's yours).
Yet another system is one which may be used in formal situations, though in a few regions it is the main one ordinarily used, where the difference lies in the direct and indirect object pronouns.
Chart 6
This scheme, when used in formal situations, attempts to follow the system in Chart 3A, except that the form for the direct object does not match. Instead, for this form, we find that it coincides with the direct object, lhe, in a practice which could be called lheismo, much in the same way that leísmo occurs in Spanish7. Thus, with this scheme, we hear yet another permutation for the phrase "I love you": Lhe amo (remember, whereas in the rest of Brazil, we'd find either Te amo or Amo você). Lhe, as it was just seen, serves ordinarily solely as an indirect object pronoun, however, here it doubles as a direct object pronoun as well, e.g. Lhe vejo (I see you) vs. Lhe dei um beijo (I gave you a kiss). In the other regions, where people generally follow the schemes presented before, the form with lheismo would be considered formal, used to avoid the single-vowel forms from the direct object (o/a); thus, Lhe vejo against Te vejo and Vejo você.
Having already looked at how some indicative tenses are realized, let's take a look at the imperative. In the imperative, we find a similar situation, where we see second- and third-person forms co-existing.
Chart 7A shows the paradigm in the standard language for the imperative singular, affirmative and negative, for most verbs, here using the verb falar (to speak), for você (coming from the third-person) and tu (second-person). Normally, the distinction between these two would be that of formal or familiar address, however, as it has been discussed, tu does not survive in a wholly manner, therefore even though one of its imperative forms is attested in Brazilian Portuguese, the distinction is not truly between você and tu in most speakers, but simply one of formality or a lack thereof. Chart 7B shows that the formal forms are the same than those in 7A, which in most verbs coincide with the present subjunctive of the third-person singular (in this case, fale). In what would be considered more familiar, we find the same form than that for tu in 7A, fala, even in speakers who don't use tu directly; thus, we hear [Você], fala! in familiar situations, even though, prescriptively, only [Tu], fala! is correct (this form coinciding with the present indicative of the third-person singular). Nonetheless, we come back to the same story, tu does not survive in the everyday standard language of Brazil, so forms from this grammatical person should not be present, with prescriptive grammar that is, so what would be correct then is [Você], fale!, though, as I said, this last form has some formality attached to it for (most) Brazilians. In the regions where tu is found, we hear [Tu], fala!, from the second-person, although outside the imperative, tu is employed with the verb in third-person, as was seen above.
In the negative imperative, there is again the formal/familiar distinction even in speakers who only use você. The formal form is the same than that in 7A, não fale!. In 7A, though, there is a different form in the negative (fales) than in the affirmative (fala); the form in the negative comes from the present subjunctive of the second-person singular. In 7B, however, both the familiar affirmative and negative use the same form, fala. Again, prescriptively, only Não fales!, which is what is used in Portugal, is correct (or, since we would expect você in Brazil, the correct form would be Não fale!, but, again, for most people, it carries some formality). You will notice I labeled the second row in 7B "familiar/emphatic"; this is because these forms can be used as well to emphasize a command (as if saying, "Take me seriously! My order is no joke!"), so generally a Não fala! is firmer and more agressive than a Não fale!.
One must keep in mind that just like everything else discussed here, this is subject to regional variation (among other factors), regarding the use and frequency of the different forms, especially when used with clitics. With object pronouns, the rule explained above applies to nearly all cases, so we may hear Me fala!, which is indeed regarded as familiar, though Me fale! can occur, even in speakers for whom the above-mentioned rule applies. With reflexives, it is possible to hear, for example, Se cuida! just as much as Se cuide!, varying from region and individual, even though, here, cuida is an imperative form belonging to the second-person used with the third-person reflexive se, unless we take it at its indicative value, in which case, both would be third-person8.
In conclusion, many of the paradigms discussed here are currently the quasi-official standard of Brazil today. Quasi-official because there may be still language purists (ah, yes, don't we love them?) who will defend the prescriptive paradigms and Brazilians may still be tested on them, for instance, in the vestibular, a college-entrance exam; after all, even if not used, these forms are part of the Portuguese language, in general. However, many of the forms and schemes discussed have already entered the Brazilian standard. These are the forms used by everyone, like I say above, from the man in the street to the college graduate, from the child entering first grade to the doctor graduating from med school, used in the media and even formal writing, it's not just some sort of "street slang". Below I include a chart with these quasi-officially standard paradigms, summarizing this discussion, and reviewing what I would call General Brazilian Portuguese (comparable to GAE, General American English). That is, the features that are shared by Brazil as a whole, and what Brazilians view as their everyday standard9.
8
You will notice that the pronominal scheme in Chart 8 is similar to that in Chart 3A, the difference being in the direct and indirect object forms, which in Chart 6 have been displaced by forms from the second-person (Chart 3B) or forms based on the subject acting as object10.
Why wasn't the second-person plural discussed? For that, let's head to Portugal.
Portugal
First, we shall take a look at how the pronominal system of the second-person singular is found in Portugal.
In Portugal, we find the formal/familiar distinction between você and tu, with the former as formal and the latter as familiar, though você doesn't carry as much formality anymore as its Spanish counterpart (i.e. usted); in more formal situations, o senhor and a senhora may be employed, as in Brazil. It can seen in Chart 9B that the familiar forms all correspond to the historical second-person, as in Chart 3B. However, the forms used with você have incorporated the two prepositional forms which traditionally were only used reflexively. These forms are found in Brazil as well, though not used in the same context; so while a reflexive phrase like Você tem que trazer isto consigo mesmo (You have to bring this with you[rself]) may be found in both countries, a non-reflexive one, with great formality, in Portugal would be Preciso falar consigo (I need to talk to you), with its equivalent in Brazil being Preciso falar com você; thus the different prepositional forms in Charts 9A and 8, in this aspect, Brazilian Portuguese being conservative (and European Portuguese, then, innovative). Another example we may look at: Isto é para si (This is for you) in Portugal, and, Isto é para você in Brazil.
The whole scheme for the direct address, plural and singular, formal and familiar, looks like this:
Chart 10
In the plural, we can see that there is no distinction in the formal and familiar, per se, at least. As it will be seen, the same person-mixing phenomenon, found in Brazil in the singular, is realized in Portugal as well, only in the plural.
Chart 11C. Second-P. Plural Address System Current in Portugal
The forms that historically belong to the true second-person plural (vós) are underlined. The scheme as seen in Chart 11B does survive in some regions in Portugal, where vós and its corresponding conjugation are used instead of vocês, and yet in other regions, the system in Chart 11A survives without intrusion from the vós forms. However, taking Portugal as a whole, it is the scheme in Chart 11C that is standard in Portugal; these are the forms used by speakers at all levels, in the media, and, this is the system a foreigner would learn if studying European Portuguese. The following phrases summarize these points.
We have just seen how much of a complex topic this is, with forms having all kinds of permutations. In my next post, I will bring more examples, authentic ones, to further illustrate the points here discussed. Also, in the near future, I shall discuss a similar tour de force which has occurred in Spanish, regarding the second-person as well. It seems this second-person will keep us talking for a while.
Footnotes
1. See De nosotros for a discussion. return
2. Another slogan showing this principle is one found on Yahoo! Brazil: Procurando alguém especial? O Yahoo! Encontros ajuda você (Looking for someone special? Yahoo! Meetings helps you). return
3. See Modern Estar and Para in Portuguese. return
4. What's more, in some substandard varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, the six way inflectional system is reduced to simply two, with only the first-person singular being distinct:
Also in these varieties, the prepositional forms are absent, and in its place we find its corresponding subject forms: com tu for standard contigo (also, com eu for comigo) and pra tu for p[a]ra ti. All of these forms are still quite stigmatised and do not form part of the Brazilian standard. return
5. The only regions where I have attested tu with its corresponding conjugation are some cities in the state of Pará, in Northern Brazil. Professor Pasquale has recorded this use of tu (second-person) with the right conjugation, but at times, employed with the object pronouns corresponding to você (third-person), in this region. He writes (my own translation): "[...] even in Belém (capital of Pará), where, in spite of the verbs and subject [being] in the second-person, sometimes we hear the pronoun lhe: Foste lá? Eu lhe disse que devias ir. return
6. This non-standard form is very frequent in Portugal, colloquially. return
7. See Laísmos, leísmos, liísmos, loísmos, luísmos for a discussion. return
8. It would then be somewhat like in Spanish where the indicative is sometimes used for commands. return
9. By everyday standard, I imply that which is used everyday in the colloquial and written language outside of highly formal situations or, again, language class. I say this because some may argue tu (or vós) is just as standard because it is studied even in school. This is true, I don't argue that these are not part of the language; on the other hand, I am simply saying that these are not used in everyday, ordinary language. An example I could draw here would be the case of thou in English; it is definitely not used anywhere in our language, though we know of its existence and usage through school. A better example, I believe, would be the distinction between who, whom and that, with animates and inanimates, subjects and objects, which is very seldomly made nowadways even in formal texts. Again, we know here what would be correct because of school, even if the proper form is not used all the time outside of there, either because a certain form feels more "natural" or another one feels more "formal", e.g. Who did you see? The woman that I saw vs. (historically) prescriptive Whom did you see? The woman whom I saw (See Language Log's I Don't Really Care Whom. return
10. It is interesting to note that in Italian an opposite phenomenon has taken place, where object forms of the third-person have moved on to act as subjects (these are lei, lui, loro), whereas in Brazilian Portuguese, the subjects have moved on to become objects. return
11. Except that Quero-lhes dar algo would be Quero lhes dar algo, without a hyphen, and with the pronoun truly preposed to the second verb, as oposed to being postposed to the first verb (first phrase). return
All these inovations involve the second-person being, in one way or another, matched up with the grammatical third-person.
The main reason for all this begins with the introduction of Vossa Mercê as a mode of polite direct address. Vossa Mercê (Your Mercy) was just one of several ways of formal address that developed over centuries in Portuguese, having parallels with the other Iberian languages (i.e. Spanish Vuestra Merced). This type of address was used with third-person morphology, hence creating a 'distance' between the speaker and the interlocutor. The direct address went from tu in the singular and vos in the plural in Latin (See Chart 1A), yielding the forms tu and vós in Portuguese, with a full formal/familiar distinction with tu as familiar, and vós as both singular formal and plural, this last one with no distinction between formal or familiar, as in modern French (Chart 1B). As these forms became too common with the populace, new polite forms began to emerge using a possessive and third person forms. Among the most significant ones are Vossa Excelência (Your Excellency) and Vossa Mercê (Your Mercy). Though several of these new forms were used at one time, Vossa Mercê became the most commonly used. Having won out, it went through several intermediate stages, including Vossemecê, Vossmecê, Vomecê, and Vomcê, until it was standardized as você (though now, particularly in Brazil, the evolution has continued to ocê, cê). The plural polite form followed the singular, and on this model it was standardized as vocês (Chart 1C).
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However, it doesn't stop here. The newly introduced synthetic forms did not completely displace the old forms. As of now, the two systems coexist, not as two, side by side, but as one, complexly intermingled.
Brazil
In Brazil, as I have stated on previous posts, the grammatical second person pronouns and their verbs forms have disappeared from the written and spoken languages, though these can often be seen in poetry and religious texts. Indeed, they have become archaisms for the vast majority of Brazilians. Chart 2 shows the second-person paradigm, standard in Brazil today.
| Singular | Plural |
|
| Familiar | você | vocês |
| Formal |
A third category can be defined here, besides the familiar and formal: highly formal. In a highly formal situation, o senhor and a senhora are expected, or, especially in writing, Vossa Excelência, though this last one is the least common of all. Other than that, você is used in all situations (not everywhere though, as it will be seen). As you will see below, the current system of oblique pronouns in Brazil is somewhat of a hybrid, coming from the Second- and Third-Persons. I have listed você as third-person nominative because, as I stated, even though it is understood as second-person, it is gramatically third-person, thus, it uses the forms corresponding to "he/she/it", ele/ela.
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| Subject | você | Você é feliz. |
| Direct O. | te | Você está aqui? Não te vejo. |
| Indirect O. | te | Vou te dar algo. |
| Reflexive | se | Não sei como você se chama. |
| Possessive | seu | Qual é seu nome? |
| Prepositional | você | Isto é para você. |
| com você | Ela irá com você. |
Charts 3A and 3B show the third and second subject (nominative) forms, followed by their corresponding oblique cases: direct object (accusative), indirect object (dative), reflexive, possessive (genitive), and last one named prepositional, where I list the forms which occur after most preprositions, including how it contracts with the preposition com, hence in 3A, the form does not contract, whereas in 3B, it does. When used reflexively, the third-person prepositional forms become si and consigo (notice the contraction with com), respectively.
Chart 3C shows the second-person singular paradigm, in which are found forms from the original second- and third-persons, current and standard in Brazil. The underlined forms in 3C are the ones that have penetrated into what was originally solely third-person. The language professors may still follow the original scheme, as in 3A, but in reality, the paradigm as in 3C is used at all social levels, from the man in the street to the college graduate. This is what feels instinctive to Brazilians, even if through school they learn and use the system in 3A, which may appear, for instance, in the language section of college entrance exams. As an example, I will cite the now famous slogan used in Brazil for an AIDS prevention campaign: Se você não se cuidar, a AIDS vai te pegar (If you don't take care of yourself, AIDS will get you). Here we see the subject (você), the reflexive pronoun (se), and the verb (cuidar), all of which are third-person. In the second part, however, we see te, which is grammatically second-person, used with the other pronouns which are third-person, together mixed to reference semantically second-person. Like I said, this is a standard practice in Brazil (not in Portugal). If this same sentence had been said instead: Se você não se cuidar, a AIDS vai o pegar, that is, with the scheme as in 3A, in which all pronouns are third-person, the reaction from the public would not have been the same. Brazilians see the scheme in 3A as being too 'scholarly', too formal, and even, quite pedantic. In order to connect with the people, 3C had to be used, which is what is said everyday in Brazil. If anything, as an alternative, without 'mixing' the grammatical persons, te could have been avoided, and, in its place, another você could have been used, only this time, after the verb: Se você não se cuidar, a AIDS vai pegar você, leading us into yet another pronominal paradigm living side by side the one we have just been looking at.
| Subject | você | você | Você é feliz. |
| Direct O. | te | você | Você está aqui? Não vejo você. |
| Indirect O. | te | a/pra você | Vou dar algo pra você. |
| Reflexive | se | você* | Registre você! |
| Possessive | seu | de você* | Este carro não é dela; é de você. |
| Prepositional | você | você | Isto é para você. |
| com você | com você | Ela irá com você. |
In 3D, we can see the reduction of the forms, even of those from the original second-person (te), with an abundance of você: você has abandoned its role as a pure subject pronoun and moved on to serve other grammatical uses. The two forms marked with asterisks, the reflexive and possessive, are rare, though I have recorded instances of their existance. First, seu, in Brazil, is explicitly taken to mean "yours (sg.)". So while there may be ambiguity on whether a certain seu means "hers, his, yours (sg.), yours (pl.), theirs", unless reading some sort of formal text, seu will always be perceived as "yours (sg.)", e.g. Ela vendeu sua casa (She sold your house); therefore, the locution de você is not truly necessary as are other persons (i.e. dela, dele, etc.)1. The você used as a reflexive pronoun, the rarest possible form, is attested in phrases such as Registre você! (Register yourself!) for the usual Registre-se (or, as it's common in Brazil to prepose the pronouns, Se registre), and Veja você! for Veja-se.
The more significant forms are those used to serve as accusative and dative, which have played a major role in the Brazilian standard. In the third-person, the accusative in Brazil is no longer marked with the corresponding pronouns as we see them in 3A (o/a). Surely, they can be found in certain types of writing, but for the average Brazilian, these seem too superficial. As you can see in 3D, the direct-object form is identical to the subject one, in a phenomenon ocurring with all third-person pronouns, and even extending to other persons at times. In the direct address, te preposed to the verb, or, você postposed to it, will convey a direct object; the choice to use either one generally has to do with euphony, though emphasis and style can play a part in this, or an individual may employ both indiscriminately. An as example, let's take the two ways of saying "I love you" which are most frequently heard in Brazil: Te amo and Amo você. This shows, in a clear way, what I have just stated about direct objects in the same way than the AIDS slogan above. The first example, Te amo, uses the form presented in Chart 3C, a mixture between the originial second- and third-person paradigms; also notice here how the object pronoun is placed before the verb. In Amo você, we see in action the system in Chart 3D: the direct object has the same form as its subject form, only postposed to the main verb. If we add to this the fact that the other grammatical persons are involved as well, we end up with a word order that is much stricter and rigid. Even though in Portugal, in certain clauses and interrogatives, after prepositions or relative pronouns, the subject tends to be placed after the verb, in Brazil, the subject is always fixed before the verb, because, as we have seen, the same form could play different functions (subject, object). Therefore, while in Portugal we would hear Como se chama você?, in Brazil we would hear Como você se chama?, and even though both constructions would be understood in either country, each country uses its own construction standardly. However, there could indeed be instances in Brazil where the placement of the pronoun would change the meaning completely. Let's take the phrases: Não sei quem você viu and Não sei quem viu você. Here, we see você in two different places, after and before the verb. In Portugal, as I said, it would be customary to place the subject after the relative pronoun, though both phrases would be understood as being the same: I don't know whom you saw. In Brazil, nonetheless, due to what has just been discussed, the two phrases could convey two different ideas. The first phrase could be analyzed as: quem as the object of the second clause, você as its subject, and viu as the verb (with você as the subject); thus, meaning, "I don't know whom you saw". The second phrase, however, because of its word placement, could be analyzed by a Brazilian as: quem as the subject of the second clause, viu as its verb, and você as its direct object; thus, meaning, "I don't know who saw you". Two complete different things2.
With the indirect object, something similar occurs. That is, the form corresponding to the subject appears as the object one, in this case, the indirect object as well. In Chart 3D, we see again that the pronoun from 3C is replaced by a variation of the subject form: você preceeded by pra, a reduction of para (to, for). Here, I use pra and not the more formal para because it's the former that is becoming generalized 3. This construction is commonly employed to replace the usual lhe as a direct object pronoun when this last one is emphasized, in which case it becomes a + pronoun. In this case, it would then be: Vou perguntar-lhe algo » Vou perguntar algo a você. Para, in some cases, can be used instead of a, and in Brazil, para, or rather pra, is preferred over a for nearly all cases. So that instead of Vou perguntar-lhe algo, one would hear Vou perguntar algo pra você. Thus, lhe is generally displaced by te or pra você, as can been in Chart 3D.
If we look at these things from the perspective of prescriptive grammar, the correct forms should be: Amo-o (or Amo-a) instead of Amo você, if one talks to the person using você; Amo-te instead of Te amo, if one talks to the person using tu. Amo-o for a Brazilian does not flow well; neither would (Eu) o amo, with the object preposed to the verb. This would feel, like I said, too superficial, unnatural to a native Brazilian. Tu, as we saw above, has disappeared from the standard everyday language in Brazil, therefore, prescriptively, we should not find te at all here. The Brazilian, nonetheless, would say either Te amo or Amo você to express the same emotion. This principle of assimilating the oblique forms to the subject applies to the other persons as well, as I have stated. The prescriptive paradigm for the true third-person singular (i.e. not direct address) is that of Chart 3A, except that the subject and prepositional forms would involve ele (he) or ela (she). Thus, in the spoken language, instead of Ele a ama, we would find Ele ama ela (He loves her), which would be different from Ela ama ele coming from Ela o ama (She loves him). We see here again that the object pronouns are displaced by their subject forms; it's word order that tells us whether a particular pronoun is being used as subject or object. The plural walks right along the singular, following the same pattern (thus, ele conhece vocês (He knows you [pl.]) and ele conhece eles (He knows them) for ele os conhece). In the first person, eu (I) may displace its own oblique forms, so that we may find, for instance, você viu eu (You saw me) for standard Você me viu. Nós (we) and its oblique forms are frequently displaced by a gente. Hence, instead of Nós trabalhamos muito and Ela nos viu, it is common to hear A gente trabalha muito and Ela viu a gente. A gente, as you can see, is treated as third person (like você) even though it is used to reference the plural first person. This further reduces the morphological verb endings that differientiate each grammatical person from six in most tenses to three (four if we consider nós)4. Taking the verb falar (to speak) as example, we have:
| Singular | Plural | |||
| eu | falo | vocês eles/elas | falam | |
| você, ele/ela, a gente | fala | |||
All of this puts Brazilian Portuguese, particularly colloquially, on the verge of being non-prodrop (whereby the subject pronouns are required in conjunction with the verb to convey proper meaning). Even in formal writing, the subject pronoun você is always maintained, and hence nearly never dropped. To express "You are", for instance, the verb by itself will not suffice; it must be used with the pronoun. If a third-person verb form is used without an explicit pronoun, either there will be confusion, or, it will be understood as an impersonal form. This is especially true of certain verbs and tenses, like that of tem (from ter, to have), for example, which in Brazil has ousted há in the sense of "there is/are". Tem, when used without a pronoun, is understood as this impersonal construction. Tem meninos aqui? does not mean "Do you have children here?" nor "Does he have children here?", rather, because there is no pronoun present, it means "Are there any children here?". To express the other two frases, the pronoun needs to be explicitly used, otherwise the meaning changes altogether, i.e. Você tem meninos aqui?, Ele tem meninos aqui?. This occurs, of course, due to the fact that the same verb form is used in all of these cases: third person. In English, do you know whom I'm referring to if I simply say "are good"? No, because the subject could be "we", "you", or "they". This is why the subject is obligatory. In (Brazilian) Portuguese, even though other verb forms remain distinctive (eu, nós), the subject pronoun tends to be used, it would seem as though by analogy with the third person, so that one may hear or read: Eu vim porque eu quis. E eu vou partir quando eu quiser (I came because I wanted to. And I will leave when I want to). This last sentence can be perfectly understood without any of the eu's, and for someone who is not used to it, this may seem overwhelmingly emphatic.
In some regions in Brazil, all of this goes even further: the third-person verb forms are used with even more grammatical persons. In many places of Southern Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro and the southern states, a survival of tu is attested. Indeed, the same tu that is no longer used in the rest of Brazil, and the same that is very alive in Portugal. There is one difference, however: even though tu is indeed second-person, it is used with third-person morphology. That is, what survives is not the standardly tu és, as used in Portugal, but, rather, tu é: tu followed by a verb in the third-person, the same form used with você, i.e. tu fala for (tu) falas, tu vem for (tu) vens5. This is sometimes attributed to the loss of final «-s», a phenomenon having ocurred in other languages, such as French and some Spanish dialects. Also noted is the loss of the morphological plural marker, «-s», throughout parts in Brazil, e.g. os livro grande for standard os livros grandes. These realizations are quite accepted at all levels in these regions (except probably in highly formal situations, and in language class!), even though these people are aware of "not using the right conjugation", to put it in their words. This theory of the loss of final «-s» makes senses when we look at the tenses in which only an «-s» distinguishes the second- and third-person singular verb forms from each other, e.g. falas (2nd p.) vs. fala (3rd p.); however, it breaks down when we look at the preterit, where the two forms are quite distinct: falaste vs. falou. In this case, there is no sole «-s» separating the two. In these regions, what we actually hear is tu falou, undoubtedly with third-person morphology, instead of (tu) falaste, where both pronoun and verb are second-person. I put the second tu in parantheses because the verb ending tells us that it is second-person singular, in the preterit, and therefore, not required. However, in the first one, tu falou, the tu is just as important as the verb and is always used, in much the same way than in French (i.e. tu parles, tu viens), where too the unique verb inflection identifying the second-person singular is no longer present (in pronunciation, that is). Sometimes, particularly in the more Southern states like Rio Grande Do Sul, people will use the correct conjugation with tu, though this practice is often regarded as pedantic. Even more, nonstandard forms exist, such as falastes with an extra «-s»6, and falasse, where the «t» has assimilated to the following «s». And even when tu is used with verb agreement, the pronoun itself will generally not be dropped, following the previous models, though the person can be devised from the ending; thus, we may hear: Tu tens que vir porque tu deves fazer o que tu não fizeste [or fizesse] (You must come because you must do what you haven't done). This same sentence without verb agreement, which is what more often is heard, and where the pronoun is required, would be: Tu tem que vir porque tu deve fazer o que tu não fiz (cp. the same in French). The corresponding oblique cases used with this are those of the second-person, as in Chart 3B. The reflexive, however, in some regions, like Rio De Janeiro, is se, and in others, like Rio Grande Do Sul, it is te; also, in some parts and some speakers, both você and tu are employed, at times, even in the same utturance. In the Southernmost states, all forms, including the reflexive, belong to the second-person, exactly as in Chart 3B, all of which are employed with verbs in the third-person. In these regions where tu is present, there exists somewhat of a formality attached to using você, with tu being considered more familiar and você being more formal, a formality which is absent in the rest of Brazil, though the distinction between the two is more or less parallel with that found in Portugal and other Romance languages. Chart 4 summarizes these points.
| You're not well. You should look at yourself in the mirror. |
| Tu não tá bem. Tu deve se olhar no espelho. |
| tu as subject, se as reflexive, verbs in 3rd-person |
| Tu não tá bem. Você deve se olhar no espelho. |
| tu as subject in first sentence; você as subject in second sentence, se as reflexive, verbs in 3rd-person |
| Tu não tá bem. Tu deve te olhar no espelho. |
| tu as subject, te as reflexive, verbs in 3rd-person |
Yet another system in Brazil, which will properly be labeled ocassional, exists, which many some Brazilians will use in given situations. Você is nearly always kept as the subject, with the oblique forms being taken from the second-person, similar to the system just discussed. These people will generally resort to this paradigm to avoid ambiguity, or to emphasize something (or they may just feel like resorting to it!). The reflexive, possessive, and the already established direct and indirect object pronouns of the second person, will emerge even in regions where tu is absent in its subject form (e.g. São Paulo), as we can see in Chart 5.
| Subject | você | Você é feliz. |
| Direct O. | te | Você está aqui? Não tevejo. |
| Indirect O. | te | Vou te dar algo. |
| Reflexive | se | Como você se chama? |
| Possessive | teu | O teu carro está aqui. |
| Prepositional | ti | Isto é para ti. |
| contigo | Ela irá contigo. |
Yet another system is one which may be used in formal situations, though in a few regions it is the main one ordinarily used, where the difference lies in the direct and indirect object pronouns.
| Subject | você | Você é feliz. |
| Direct O. | lhe | Você está aqui? Não lhe vejo. |
| Indirect O. | lhe | Vou lhe dar algo. |
| Reflexive | se | Como você se chama? |
| Possessive | seu | O seu carro está aqui. |
| Prepositional | você | Isto é para você. |
| com você | Ela irá com você. |
This scheme, when used in formal situations, attempts to follow the system in Chart 3A, except that the form for the direct object does not match. Instead, for this form, we find that it coincides with the direct object, lhe, in a practice which could be called lheismo, much in the same way that leísmo occurs in Spanish7. Thus, with this scheme, we hear yet another permutation for the phrase "I love you": Lhe amo (remember, whereas in the rest of Brazil, we'd find either Te amo or Amo você). Lhe, as it was just seen, serves ordinarily solely as an indirect object pronoun, however, here it doubles as a direct object pronoun as well, e.g. Lhe vejo (I see you) vs. Lhe dei um beijo (I gave you a kiss). In the other regions, where people generally follow the schemes presented before, the form with lheismo would be considered formal, used to avoid the single-vowel forms from the direct object (o/a); thus, Lhe vejo against Te vejo and Vejo você.
Having already looked at how some indicative tenses are realized, let's take a look at the imperative. In the imperative, we find a similar situation, where we see second- and third-person forms co-existing.
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In the negative imperative, there is again the formal/familiar distinction even in speakers who only use você. The formal form is the same than that in 7A, não fale!. In 7A, though, there is a different form in the negative (fales) than in the affirmative (fala); the form in the negative comes from the present subjunctive of the second-person singular. In 7B, however, both the familiar affirmative and negative use the same form, fala. Again, prescriptively, only Não fales!, which is what is used in Portugal, is correct (or, since we would expect você in Brazil, the correct form would be Não fale!, but, again, for most people, it carries some formality). You will notice I labeled the second row in 7B "familiar/emphatic"; this is because these forms can be used as well to emphasize a command (as if saying, "Take me seriously! My order is no joke!"), so generally a Não fala! is firmer and more agressive than a Não fale!.
One must keep in mind that just like everything else discussed here, this is subject to regional variation (among other factors), regarding the use and frequency of the different forms, especially when used with clitics. With object pronouns, the rule explained above applies to nearly all cases, so we may hear Me fala!, which is indeed regarded as familiar, though Me fale! can occur, even in speakers for whom the above-mentioned rule applies. With reflexives, it is possible to hear, for example, Se cuida! just as much as Se cuide!, varying from region and individual, even though, here, cuida is an imperative form belonging to the second-person used with the third-person reflexive se, unless we take it at its indicative value, in which case, both would be third-person8.
In conclusion, many of the paradigms discussed here are currently the quasi-official standard of Brazil today. Quasi-official because there may be still language purists (ah, yes, don't we love them?) who will defend the prescriptive paradigms and Brazilians may still be tested on them, for instance, in the vestibular, a college-entrance exam; after all, even if not used, these forms are part of the Portuguese language, in general. However, many of the forms and schemes discussed have already entered the Brazilian standard. These are the forms used by everyone, like I say above, from the man in the street to the college graduate, from the child entering first grade to the doctor graduating from med school, used in the media and even formal writing, it's not just some sort of "street slang". Below I include a chart with these quasi-officially standard paradigms, summarizing this discussion, and reviewing what I would call General Brazilian Portuguese (comparable to GAE, General American English). That is, the features that are shared by Brazil as a whole, and what Brazilians view as their everyday standard9.
| Subject | você |
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| Direct O. | te | você |
| Indirect O. | te | a/pra você |
| Reflexive | se |
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| Possessive | seu |
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| Prepositional | você |
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| com você |
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Why wasn't the second-person plural discussed? For that, let's head to Portugal.
Portugal
First, we shall take a look at how the pronominal system of the second-person singular is found in Portugal.
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The whole scheme for the direct address, plural and singular, formal and familiar, looks like this:
| Singular | Plural |
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| Familiar | tu | vocês |
| Formal | você |
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| Subject | vocês | Você é feliz. |
| Direct O. | vos | Vocês estão aqui? Não vos vejo. |
| Indirect O. | vos | Vou-vos dar algo. |
| Reflexive | se | Não sei como se chamam vocês. |
| Possessive | vosso | Aonde fica o vosso país? |
| Prepositional | vocês | Isto é para vocês. |
| convosco | Ela irá convosco. |
| I need to see you / I want to give something to you / Stay in your houses! / I desire to go with you / Shut up! |
| Preciso ver-vos / Quero-vos dar algo / Fiquem nas vossas casas! / Desejo ir convosco / Calem-se! |
| As it would be said in Portugal; oblique forms from the second-person (vós), except for the reflexive, which remains in third-person, with verb in third-person plural.
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| Preciso ver-vos / Quero-vos dar algo / Ficai nas vossas casas! / Desejo ir convosco / Calai-vos! |
| This one follows the true historically second-person plural, as in Chart 11A; oblique forms all from the second-person, including the reflexive, with verb in the second-person plural as well.
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| Preciso ver vocês / Quero dar algo pra vocês / Fiquem nas casas de vocês! / Desejo ir com vocês / Se calem! |
| The same phrase as it would be said colloquially in Brazil, following the models of the singular discussed above; obliques follow some analitical form based on the subject form, except the reflexive, which is in the usual third-person along with the verb; proclise in the imperative.
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| Preciso vê-los / Quero-lhes dar algo / Fiquem nas suas casas! / Desejo ir com vocês / Calem-se! |
| This one follows the traditional third-person oblique forms, including the verb; this would be said in Brazil, also, in a more formal context11 and in Portugal if following, historically, prescriptive grammar.
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We have just seen how much of a complex topic this is, with forms having all kinds of permutations. In my next post, I will bring more examples, authentic ones, to further illustrate the points here discussed. Also, in the near future, I shall discuss a similar tour de force which has occurred in Spanish, regarding the second-person as well. It seems this second-person will keep us talking for a while.
Footnotes
1. See De nosotros for a discussion. return
2. Another slogan showing this principle is one found on Yahoo! Brazil: Procurando alguém especial? O Yahoo! Encontros ajuda você (Looking for someone special? Yahoo! Meetings helps you). return
3. See Modern Estar and Para in Portuguese. return
4. What's more, in some substandard varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, the six way inflectional system is reduced to simply two, with only the first-person singular being distinct:
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5. The only regions where I have attested tu with its corresponding conjugation are some cities in the state of Pará, in Northern Brazil. Professor Pasquale has recorded this use of tu (second-person) with the right conjugation, but at times, employed with the object pronouns corresponding to você (third-person), in this region. He writes (my own translation): "[...] even in Belém (capital of Pará), where, in spite of the verbs and subject [being] in the second-person, sometimes we hear the pronoun lhe: Foste lá? Eu lhe disse que devias ir. return
6. This non-standard form is very frequent in Portugal, colloquially. return
7. See Laísmos, leísmos, liísmos, loísmos, luísmos for a discussion. return
8. It would then be somewhat like in Spanish where the indicative is sometimes used for commands. return
9. By everyday standard, I imply that which is used everyday in the colloquial and written language outside of highly formal situations or, again, language class. I say this because some may argue tu (or vós) is just as standard because it is studied even in school. This is true, I don't argue that these are not part of the language; on the other hand, I am simply saying that these are not used in everyday, ordinary language. An example I could draw here would be the case of thou in English; it is definitely not used anywhere in our language, though we know of its existence and usage through school. A better example, I believe, would be the distinction between who, whom and that, with animates and inanimates, subjects and objects, which is very seldomly made nowadways even in formal texts. Again, we know here what would be correct because of school, even if the proper form is not used all the time outside of there, either because a certain form feels more "natural" or another one feels more "formal", e.g. Who did you see? The woman that I saw vs. (historically) prescriptive Whom did you see? The woman whom I saw (See Language Log's I Don't Really Care Whom. return
10. It is interesting to note that in Italian an opposite phenomenon has taken place, where object forms of the third-person have moved on to act as subjects (these are lei, lui, loro), whereas in Brazilian Portuguese, the subjects have moved on to become objects. return
11. Except that Quero-lhes dar algo would be Quero lhes dar algo, without a hyphen, and with the pronoun truly preposed to the second verb, as oposed to being postposed to the first verb (first phrase). return
