I confess my enjoyment of words extends to learning those of other languages. Sometimes taking up another language has been a help for vacations abroad. Like several weeks in Italy or a similar stay in Japan. But learning conversational French for a few days in Paris?
Probably learning Spanish, starting in junior high, was a given because I grew up in the Southwest. But why did I take German in high school? Possibly for some vague notion it might mesh with a scientific career, if I took that path. But that I took a semester of German in college, surely a throwaway elective to pad out my accumulated credits toward a B.A. in English.
One language I took up out of intellectual curiosity was Greek, both written and spoken. I have a copy of the New Testament in Koine Greek and reading that source document often shows where the translators made decisions on English equivalents.
And I learned some basic Russian (including the Cyrillic alphabet) if only because I greeted many emigrés from the Former Soviet Union when I worked at the food pantry.
All this brings me to my latest language: Portuguese, the Brazilian variety, Brazil being home to 85% of Portuguese speakers. I don’t plan to visit São Paulo, but like the language for itself. Once, a Venezuelan coworker called it "bad Spanish," but that's a cheap shot. Yes, Portuguese, a Romance language, is sort of like Spanish or Italian with surprising hints of French. For example, "you" is você, which sounds more like French vous than Spanish usted.
But what I really like about Portuguese is its fluidity. If certain eastern European words seems to lack vowels, Portuguese seems to have an excess of vowels, vowels that get elided or merged.
And then there's learning the pronunciation code: If the "o" is at the end of a word, it's pronounced as "oo" or "u." And depending on where in the word it occurs and what vowel follows, "d" has a habit of flipping and becoming a "g." Thus, Good morning, "Bom dia," is pronounced "bone gee-a" which emulates a French Buonjour. And then there's the initial "r" that becomes an "h" and the final "t" before a vowel that becomes "ch." A pedestrian word we know from other Romance languages, "restaurante," is transformed to "hester raunchy."
In short, Portuguese has a joy in how it sounds (unlike my abandoned German). Perhaps that's why I never tire of listening to Brazilian jazz from the likes of João Gilberto with his timeless Girl from Ipanema (Garota de Ipanema).
Image credit: downbeat.com
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