What a difference seven days make. One week ago, I posted a photo from our Friday morning field trip to the public TV station in Bauru. Just a few days later our University announced that classes will be suspended for at least one month. Brazil is only now slowly awakening to the crisis of coronavirus. As things here change rapidly, I’m finding myself practicing social distancing -- even if no one else in our city seems to be doing the same -- and learning to devise online methods for overseeing a research project that relies upon facilitated dialogues. Since I’m lucky enough to work from home, I thought I’d post about my recent adventures in learning the language.
Fake news, fake eyelashes, finsta, I mean, we all need crutches now and again; but as I learn Portuguese I’m finding it all too easy to make fake friends. Falsos amigos -- the same term exists in Spanish -- refers to words that appear to be cognates but are not. Por ejemplo, if I tell a friend, “Estoy embarazado,” she may not assume that I feel awkwardness and shame, but instead that I am a miracle of male-bodied gestation. A cognate is a word that sounds and looks more or less the same in both languages and also has the same or equivalent meaning. For example, you will not express alarma when I tell you the Spanish word, “familia” means exactamente the same thing as “family.” Since I know some Spanish -- and since the two Romance languages are very similar, reading Portuguese has not been hard. The things that have really tripped me up in Brazil are articles, conjunctions, pronunciation (so different), and falsos amigos.
Rodolpho hams it up in front of the “OK Hotel.”
On the way from Panama to Brazil, the flight attendant greeted me in Spanish and offered two choices for the in-flight meal: “Una hamburguesa, o un sándwich de Perú?” Even if you don’t speak Spanish, you can probably get the gist of what he was asking me; and yet, I didn’t quite understand the second option. I have eaten a Cuban sandwich, so I guessed maybe Peru had its own eponymous menu item. Still I asked, “Creo que Perú es un país. Que es un sandwich de Perú?” (I think Peru is a country. What’s a Peru sandwich?). His response was that the bread contained Peru. Eager for a new experience, I was a little disappointed to find that while the sandwich did not encapsulate the Pacific Andean nation, it did contain turkey. In Spanish it’s pavo.
Maybe this pharmacy could help men my age?
Use and misuse are a two way street. Because of the international success of American entertainment and other products, what some describe as cultural imperialism, the English language is globally ubiquitous. But, not unlike Chevrolet’s failed attempt to market the Nova in Latin America (porque, quién le gustaría un carro que no va?), Brazil’s weird deployments of English in branding and advertising are often confusing. And some usages of Portuguese are off-putting to non-speakers. For instance, my AirBnB host thoughtfully left a bottle of Shoulder Home Spray for me in the apartment. Does it smell like a shoulder? Am I meant to spray it over my shoulder? Only in Japan have I seen equally widespread and hilarious (mis)uses.
When I travelled by bus from São Paulo to Bauru I was surprised to see so many roadside taverns advertising themselves as places where you could get totally blotto. The word, “borracha / borracho” in Spanish means a drunk person, and the suffix “-aria / -eria” transforms just about any noun into a restaurant or shop that purveys that thing. After a few weeks in Bauru, I finally happened upon a borracharia in my neighborhood, and the curbside signage cleared up my ignorant misapprehension. See the image at the top of this post.
Do I want to shop at this store in Bauru’s mall?
I went to a stationery store to get a few things for the classroom. When a friendly, young employee asked if she could help, I replied, “Eu gostaria pegamento.” Her smile dropped, she cautiously asked me to repeat myself, and I guessed at the possible pronunciation in Portuguese. “Preciso de pegação?” She blanched and walked quickly to a door in the back. Moments later, a man close to my age emerged. “What do you want,” he asked curtly in English. His mouth was fixed in a tight grimace. “Glue,” I replied. “I need glue to make something for my students.” He instantly relaxed and loudly narrated our exchange in Portuguese to his colleagues. The store erupted in laughter. While “pegamento” means “adhesive” in Spanish, in Brazilian Portuguese (and with my ill-advised pronunciation), I was propositioning her. The salespeople seemed relieved to learn that wasn’t the kind of coming together I was seeking. No really, this rubber cement will be just fine.
The thing that makes fake friends fun, I think, is that they are more the exception than the rule; but, even though Spanish and Portuguese have a high degree of lexical similarity, their phonology, grammar, and usage are quite different. It’s all in how you use your tongue.