Brazilian Portuguese has taken on so many words from English that some don’t just have different pronunciations. They have developed wonderful new meanings.
By Claire Rigby
Soon after taking my first steps towards speaking Portuguese years ago, I got talking to the owner of a small-town language school in Minas Gerais. Happy to be speaking English to a live specimen in the wild, she was explaining her marketing strategy for the school when we hit a brick wall. ‘Outchydoor’, she told me. She was wondering whether to advertise on one. What? OUTCHYDOOR, she said again, looking irritated that her English was letting her down. Spelling it out didn’t help (‘outdoor’), but an explanation of the concept finally cracked it.
‘Billboard’. It was a billboard, and my first contact with the rich vein of English loanwords in Portuguese. Outdoor is still my favourite, and one of the many loanwords that grab a word by the scruff of the neck and haul it in, almost severing it from its original meaning.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of English etymology knows about its similar cut-and-paste background, and its layers of language from successive invading tribes – Picts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans – to the extent that Celtic British, the only language that might have had a claim to being indigenous to Britain, is almost completely absent from modern-day English.
Portuguese has similarly, if more recently, mixed roots – take sambar and moqueca from Africa, and caju and pitanga from Tupi-Guarani. And English, too: lots of it, from signs in shop windows (‘SALE, 50% OFF’) and on provincial hairdressers’ name signs – ‘Angel’s Hair’, ‘Stylu’s Cabeleireiros’ – to hundreds of other words in daily use: ‘light’, ‘design’, ‘fake’ and ‘pub’; or the transliterated beisbol (baseball), voleibol (volleyball), chique (chic) and blefe (bluff).
Some of the best words are completely assimilated: lanche, from the American word ‘luncheonette’, which has broken away from lanchonete (snackbar) to mean ‘snack’. Blecaute, pronounced bleck-outchy, means power cut; and the best of them all: X. As in, ‘xis’, the letter X, correctly pronounced (shees). It sounds like the English word ‘cheese’ to a Brazilian ear, so ‘cheeseburger’ is transliterated as X-burguer, and from there strikes out into constructions like X-salada and the majestic X-tudo – a cheeseburger with the full works (‘tudo’).
Other English loanwords come in neat sets – finance is full of them, as is IT (internet, site, link, download – or ‘internechy’, ‘sitechy’, ‘linky’, ‘downloadjee’, as they are pronounced).
At Time Out São Paulo, the office is like a language-lab petri dish, with words swapped in and out of each language all day long as we pull together our monthly magazine and website in both languages. It’s fascinating to see people join the team, improve their second language in leaps and bounds – we speak roughly half English and half Portuguese in the office – and then descend into a world of hybrid language. Like good journalists, we try not to mangle the words too much; but where borrowing and lending them is concerned, it’s a free-for-all.
‘What shall we destacar on this page? – (highlight, or feature). ‘Save that photo for the abre’ (opening spread); and monthly, like clockwork, the dreaded ‘fechamento’ (closing the issue, ready to go to press). Brazilian members of the team scatter words like ‘preview’, ‘highlight’ and ‘venue’ into their sentences. Others are exclamations, too delicious to avoid using in both languages: Gente! Nossa! Puxa! (Some of the English ones our Portuguese colleagues have been using are unprintable. We’re not sure where they’re getting them from.)
Most of the traffic is in the direction Portuguese—English, which is not surprising, since the English-speaking side of the redação (editorial office) is a minority. Ours is a Brazilian operation first and foremost, Time Out’s London roots aside, and the experience of diving into the world of Brazilian journalism, vocabulary and all, in the company of some very fine Brazilian journalists, is an exhilarating one. As is the cross-pollination of language that we live every day. I spent my first year in São Paulo carefully pronouncing the loanword ‘freelance’, in Portuguese, before realising I had it completely wrong: the word is frila, from the verb to frilar – to work on a freelance basis. That’s what I’m talking about.
Claire Rigby is the editor of Time Out São Paulo, in English. She was previously the editor of Time Out Buenos Aires, and has worked as a freelance journalist for titles including the Guardian and the Telegraph.
She writes for From Brazil every other Wednesday.
Follow @claire_rigby
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