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Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world hungryphrog @lemmy.blahaj.zone

What weird idioms/phrases does your language have?

In Finnish we have "kissanristiäiset" (literally means a cat's christening), which means some trivial and meaningless celebration/event.

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  • There's a bunch of weird ones in Portuguese.

    • "Caroço de manga não é sabonete" Do you think that mango seed is soap? = "this is an absurd proposal/situation/etc."
    • "Pobre só sobe na vida quando o barraco explode" Poor people only ascend on life when the [shit]shack explodes. = "don't expect social ascension"
    • "Enquanto vem com o milho, já comi a polenta." While you're bringing the corn, I already ate the polenta. = "I've already handled this, you're too late."
    • "um polaco de cada colônia" a Pole from each settlement = a bunch of randomly picked people or items. I don't think that people use this too much outside Paraná.
    • "farinha do mesmo saco" flour from the same bag = extremely similar in some aspects that matter (and usually negative ones)
    • "comer o pão que o diabo amassou" to eat the bread kneaded by the devil = to go through rough times
    • "Vai chupar prego até virar tachinha!" Go suck an [iron] nail until it becomes a thumbtack! = somewhat polite way to tell someone to fuck off
    • "Vai ver se estou na esquina." *Go check if I'm around the corner." = also a way to tell people to fuck off
    • "anta quadrada" squared tapir = "anta" tapir is used to call someone stupid, so anta quadrada is stupid to the power of two.
    • "anta cúbica" cubed tapir = because some people do some really, really stupid shit.
    • "mais louco que o Requião de pedalinho" crazier than Requião on a paddle boat = Requião is a politician here in Paraná known for his crazy antics. The phrase highlights that something is completely fucking crazy. Clearly local.
    • "teu cu" your arse[hole] = definitively, clearly, and blatantly "no".

    • "While you're bringing corn, I already ate the polenta" is brutal

    • Small note, this is Brazilian Portuguese 🇧🇷 (PT-BR), not European Portuguese 🇵🇹 (PT-PT). I never heard most of these. We do have the "farinha do mesmo saco" and "comer o pão que o diabo amassou" though.

      • One important detail is that those country-based labels are at most abstractions or geographical terms. "Brazilian Portuguese" and "European Portuguese" aren't actual, well-defined dialects; what people actually speak is local, in both sides. (e.g. "Paulistano Portuguese", "Alentejano Portuguese", "Estremenho Portuguese", you get the idea.)

        This is relevant here because I wouldn't be surprised if plenty Brazilians never heard some of those. For example, "um polaco de cada colônia" only makes sense in Paraná, Polish immigration here was large enough to make some people call other immigrants "Poles", even Germans and Italians. So the "Poles from each colony" are usually people/things that you might think that are related, but have zero to do with each other.

        • You're not wrong but the way I see it it's a hierarchical term.

          Portuguese - all Portuguese based languages Brazilian Portuguese - all Portuguese dialects in Brazil European Portuguese - all Portuguese dialects in Portugal Angolan Portuguese - all Portuguese dialects in Angola and so on...

          I'm not expecting everyone to know every expression under the sun, but those are CLEARLY Brazilian-Portuguese based so I thought it best to clear it up because people just say Portuguese most times and I feel that creates some confusion.

          • Sorry for the long reply, I happen to enjoy this subject quite a bit.

            The "hierarchy" breaks once you try to analyse it with no regards to governments, focusing solely on linguistic features (phonetic, phonology, syntax, and the expressions). Because of things like this:

            • Manezinho (from Florianópolis) and Azorean dialects are clearly a beast apart. They can understand each other, nobody else can understand them. If there's one major division in Portuguese, it got to be Insular with those two and Continental with the others.
            • Alentejo usage of -ndo gerunds, a gente, and a partially syllable-timed prosody. Those things are typically associated with BP, not EP.
            • Mineiro (BP) often reducing vowels even more aggressively than Estremenho (EP), even if theoretically BP is known for syllable-timed prosody.
            • More conservative speakers in Paraná and Santa Catarina not raising the final unstressed vowels (you know, that "dor de dente" [dẽte] meme for Curitiba? That's it), while almost everyone else would raise it to either [ɨ] or [i]. It's a phonemic deal because the raising merges /e o/ and /i u/ in this position. For reference this conservation of the unraised vowels is usually associated with Galician, not even Portuguese. And it's actually a phonemic deal, since the raising triggers a merge for non-conservative speakers in Brazil.
            • The dialects in the northern ~half of Brazil (N, NE, chunks of SE) palatalising [s~z] into [ʃ~ʒ], a trait shared with dialects spoken in Portugal, but not with the southern ~half.
            • In the same rough area as above you got a coda /ɾ/→/r/ shift. Mattoso Câmara tries to deal with it in a cheesy way, but it's also phonemic in nature, unlike using [ɹ] for /ɾ/.
            • Lack of regressive T-palatalisation (/ti/ as [tʃi]) in some chunks of the Brazilian Northeast, in Cuiabá and in some chunks of Santa Catarina. Often with some caveat, like Cuiabano rendering /ʃ/ as [tʃ] instead, some Nordestinos doing progressive palatalisation (e.g. "oito" as [ojtʃu]) and some Catarinas using [ts] instead (e.g. "tia" as [tsiɐ]), that's clearly a parallel development.
            • Trasmontano still keeping the old /ʃ/ vs. /tʃ/ distinction; e.g. "xícara" with /ʃ/, but "chiar" with /tʃ/.
            • A few heavily conservative expressions used in Caipira Portuguese, such as "inda" and "despois". Caipira also merges the original coda /l/ with /ɾ/ instead of /w/ (e.g. "mal" as homophone of "mar", not of "mau")
            • The SOV→SVO shift for clitic pronouns (te falar → falar-te) being likely more recent in Portugal than the colonisation of Brazil; for example, check news for the Lisbon earthquake and you'll see SOV being used all the time.

            I'm not informed enough on the dialects spoken in Africa to affirm anything about them, but I wouldn't be surprised if that also applied there - for example, Portuguese as spoken in Luanda being actually closer to the one in Lisbon than the one in the Angolan countryside.

            And it actually makes sense, when you think about the initial colonisation of Brazil - you had four initial settlements, most people were likely from southern Portugal, and each settlement would undergo independent dialect levelling.

            Any hierarchy that we put here would eventually break, by the way. You get a bunch of wave innovations but their pattern usually ties large centres together, regardless of country, with rural varieties either adopting those features later or developing alternative ones. But if we must see it on a hierarchical way, the split wouldn't follow country borders, it would be more like:

            • Galician-Portuguese → Galician + Portuguese
            • Portuguese → Coimbra-Lisbon + "a gente" dialects (southern Portugal and Brazil)
            • "a gente" dialects → coda-/r/ dialects (northern half of Brazil) vs. coda-/ɾ/ (southern half of Brazil + Alentejo and the Algarve)

            Note how the division actually lumps Alentejano and Algarviano alongside what you'd call BP, not EP. And note how it still breaks, for example the /ʃ/ coda in the northern half of Brazil was likely interference from Estremenho, even if both dialects would be relatively far from each other in the hierarchy.

            • That was a lot to take in indeed. I can't speak for other dialects, but I can understand Azorean accent absolutely fine, same with Madeira. There are some idiomatic expressions here and there that I would maybe not understand but I would still clearly call it European Portuguese.

              The same goes for Alentejo. They do use -ndo ending sometimes but I would still clearly call it mostly European Portuguese.

              I don't think this subject needs to be as complicated as you make it. Yes, if we deep dive we can look at things that way but I don't really think that kind of discussion applies here, nor am I knowledgeable enough to engage with you on that hahah

              I do love how passionate you are about it though!

              • At the end of the day what I mean is simply that any somewhat scientific "split" will not match the countries, making the labels near useless for a "hierarchy" (tree-like model) of sorts.

                One important detail to consider is expectations - I've noticed that plenty speakers in Brazil tend to associate EP with specifically Estremenho, and in Portugal it seems to be that BP is mostly associated with Paulistano. But since those two diverge quite a bit from each other, this difference ends [incorrectly] extrapolated to some expectation of otherness and uniformity in "Portuguese as spoken there".

                Tendo dito isto, já que disse entender a variedade dos Açores: como classificaria a variedade deste vídeo - pt_PT ou pt_BR?

                I do love how passionate you are about it though!

                Thanks, and sorry - durante meus tempos de uni trabalhei com variedades locais (embora o foco fosse outro), então acabo falando um pouco demais do assunto, quando vem à tona.

    • Alternative for "vai ver se estou na esquina" is "vai catar coquinho" (go gather little coconuts), I guess because it's a silly, futile task?

    • Haven't seen some of these before. Ones I particularly like are:

      • Tirar o cavalo da chuva: take your horse away from the rain = give up on something
      • Lavar as mãos: wash (the) hands = do not involve yourself in something

    • Only a few of these - “comer o pão que o diabo amassou”, "vai ver se estou na esquina" - are used in Portugal, so they're mostly used in Brasil.

      The language hasn't drifted all that much in between both countries during the last couple of hundred years but expressions seem to tend to be the first to drift away.

      • It also seems to me that expressions drift away faster than other aspects of the language. Perhaps due to their casual nature, or due to context. And they're often extremely local, too - for example, I've heard nordestinos using "sacrifício de mundo" (lit. world sacrifice) to refer to difficult things, while folks here in Paraná practically never do it. While saying that something is "uma vaca no milharal" (a cow in the corn farm - wrecking everything with no regards or reason) usually outs the person as from a rural background.

        For speakers from Portugal there's an additional weird expression: pila is used here in Paraná as a completely innocent word for money, e.g. "dois pila" two bucks. (In PT I believe that it's used as a slang for dick.)

    • I always said it as while you're bringing the wheat I already ate the bread. But in my family we exaggerated it for effect: while you're buying the wheat seed, I already shat the bread 😂

      • while you’re buying the wheat seed, I already shat the bread

        Like, "enquanto você tá comprando o trigo, já caguei o pão"? That's hilarious!

        • Isso, e era competição entre meus irmãos pra exagerar ao máximo : tipo, enquanto você estava a caminho da loja pra comprar o trigo, eu já comi o pão, caguei, fiz composto com a merda e plantei mais trigo, etc, etc

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