Questions tagged [portuguese]
A Romance language spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and other former Portuguese colonies. For non-linguistic questions about the Portuguese language, visit our sister site Portuguese Language Stack Exchange.
36 questions
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Why is Portuguese 'mundo' transcribed phonemically /ˈmũ.du/ but for other languages not even phonetic transcription records a "deviation" from /n/?
For a short version of the question, see at the end EDIT AFTER COMMENTS:
I know about the Differences between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions, and I am referring to the phonemic transcription, ...
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Is this preposition stranding or not?
I am a linguistics student and am currently doing research on supposed cases of preposition stranding in Brazilian Portuguese. So far I've come up with a few assumptions, but my data has been mostly ...
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Why is the future tense almost completely regular in Portuguese?
In Portuguese (Br, and I think Pt too), the future tense of a verb can be created by taking its infinitive, and adding a suffix depending on the subject, e.g.:
to think -> pensar
I will think -> ...
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What is closer to 16th century Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese or Portuguese from Portugal?
Shouldn't Brazilian Portuguese sound closer to it, as they pronounce more syllables?
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History and Reason of Portuguese accentuation marks
What is the background of having rules for marking the accentuated syllables in Portuguese? For example the word "tecnológica" is a proparoxytone, and all of these words must have a graphic ...
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Why does "s" in Portuguese sound like /z/ between vowels?
I am a native speaker of Portuguese and for a long time I've wanted to know why some of the rules of the language are the way they are. I am very fond of linguistics and of learning languages, but I ...
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Why do I hear the p, t, k in Portuguese as aspirated plosives?
First, some of my linguistic background: I'm a native Cantonese Chinese speaker. I speak fluent Mandarin Chinese but with heavy Cantonese accent. I have a working-level proficiency in English, meaning ...
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Conjugation stem changes in Portuguese
Currently, I am learning Portuguese. I have some knowledge of Spanish as well.
The biggest difference in conjugation (indicative present tense) that I have found between Spanish and Portuguese is that ...
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Portuguese — Why use definite articles in front of possessive nouns? Why the extensive use of proposition contraction?
I can speak Spanish and French, and I am currently learning Portuguese. During my learning, I realized that there are some unique features in Portuguese — I don't speak Italian, so I don't know if ...
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Why does the Portuguese language sound similar to French language to me?
I thought Portuguese would sound very close to Spanish. However, to me, it sounds more like French?
Why is that?
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Is anything known about the origin of the hard "g" in "guénti" in Santiago, Cape Verdean Creole?
There is a word "guénti" /'gɛn ti/ in the Santiago dialect of Cape Verdean Creole, which is used to mean "people" or "you people/you all". It clearly comes from the ...
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Did the Portuguese influence how days of the week are named in Vietnamese and Chinese?
The Portuguese were some of the first colonizers / missionaries in the Far East. In the case of Vietnam, they created the first phonetic transcription of the language. Interestingly, nowadays the ...
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Which language is the closest lexically to Spanish?
I've found this Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance here when looking for a way to know if Portuguese is the most similar language to Spanish. Unfortunately neither of these languages are in ...
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minimal pairs for Portuguese
Does anyone know of a list of minimal pairs for pronunciation, preferably with audio files?
So far the best I have found https://european-portuguese.info/minimalpairs but this is specific to European. ...
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Use of the definite article in European vs. Brazilian Portuguese
When I started learning Portuguese years ago, all the books I used at the time told me that when using possessive adjectives you also have to put the corresponding definite article in front of the ...
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Portuguese: Inconsistencies in use of second person pronouns and conjugation
I observed that both colloquial Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese show some inconsistencies in the way they use the second person pronoun (or its conjugation) and would like to know if my ...
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Why do I speak more accurately in English rather than my native language?
I have a diction/vocal issue from birth so I can not speak on the "right rhythm" of my tongue. My speech seems always slow and boring at my native language so that I have a huge difficult to verbally ...
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Do all colonized countries use formal second pronouns person in daily life?
In Spanish vosotros/tu is used in an informal conversation and usted(es) in an formal one.
Whereas in the majority of the countries in Latin America, usted(es) is used constantly.
The same goes with ...
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How did "li" come to mean "here" in Cape Verdean Creole?
The words li and la in Cape Verdean Creole look parallel to the Portuguese words ali and lá. There's just one problem: li and ali are opposites. Li means "here", while ali means "there". There are ...
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What sound change(s) underlie [iʒ-] in São Vicente?
Is there a particular sound change that would explain changing a word-initial [ʒu] (or alternatively [dʒu]) to [iʒ] before a stressed syllable? Or might this be best explained as dropping the [u] by ...
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Why the grammatical difference between "eu gosto" in Portuguese and "me gusta" in Spanish. What's the historical evolution of this expression?
Apparently, "eu" is the subject in "eu gosto (de isso)" while "me" is the object in "me gusta (algo)". Why such a difference between two languages? What's the historical evolution of this expression?
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Where does my weird way of saying 'no' comes from?
At least in the region of Brazil where I come from (triângulo mineiro, Brazilian Texas I'd say.. we are considered the farmers of the Brazil also because of our accent ) people have a very weird way ...
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Why aren't there conjunctive adverbs in Portuguese?
In English, German, and even Spanish, there is a constituent which appears to be a a gray area between adverbs and conjunctions: the conjunctive adverb, or adverbial conjunction.
Examples of those ...
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Before being borrowed by Europeans, was "hurricane" ever pronounced with an initial "f"?
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Spanish works about the New World in the 1500s wrote the word we spell in modern English as "hurricane" alternatively as "huracan" or "furacan". A ...
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"se se" in Portuguese
In Portuguese it occurs a phenomenon of se word repetition. The first se is translated to English as if, and the second is the reflexive pronoun of the singular 3rd person, as the last word of the ...
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Fronting of a to æ in European Portuguese
In Portuguese there are two accepted reasons vowels in verbs alternate in height.
The vowel harmonizing rule states that where the theme vowel (a from -ar, e from -er, and i from -ir) is deleted ...
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Pronunciation Dictionary for Portuguese
Is there any comprehensive pronunciation dictionary for Portoguese language like CMU dictionary for English?
Thanks.
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Do any languages have half-voiced affricates?
While hearing something on the radio in Lisbon, I heard this phrase:
A lei diz que tu não podes... (The law says you can't...)
The word that interests me the most is the last one podes which is ...
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What vowels are most likely to be deleted in European Portuguese?
Stepping off of the airplane in Lisbon, I could immediately hear that the pronunciation was much different from Brazilian Portuguese, which I am more accustomed to.
The level of vowel deletion was ...
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Resources/papers on Portuguese nominal syntax and determiners?
I'm vaguely aware that the (definite) determiner has a much freer distribution in Portuguese than in other languages, e.g. it can come before personal names:
A Maria lê um livro.
The Maria reads a ...
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Where did the nasal sound in the Portuguese word "sim" come from?
Among the descendants of the Latin word sic ("thus, so, or just like that"), only the Portuguese word sim ends with a nasal consonant. Actually, in modern Portuguese, it ends with a nasal vowel, [sĩ], ...
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How many morphological cases does Portuguese have?
In WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures), "Number of Cases" is listed for most languages. However, this information is absent for Portuguese.
Does Portuguese have any morphological case marking? ...
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How did the Portuguese pronoun "se" take on these other functions?
In Portuguese, the third person accusative pronoun se ("himself/herself/itself/themselves") can be used for four different purposes:
1.) Most straightforwardly, as a reflexive pronoun:
Mantém-se ...
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Why does Spanish have so many diphthongs compared to other Romance languages?
I have studied and known Spanish my whole life, and got a job at a University where I am allowed to take some free classes. Over the past three years, I have taken all the Italian classes offered, all ...
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Why the infinitive in Portuguese "Cartago tem que ser destruída"?
Cartago tem que ser destruída.
"Carthage must be destroyed." I'm wondering about the infinitive (ser): where does it come from? In what situations is the infinitive used after que: only with ter + ...
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Verb-attraction parameter in Portuguese
Prof. John McWorther, in his course on Linguistics, said, in a lecture about principles and parameters: "if a language is pro-drop, the verb attraction parameter is always set on. If a language ...
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