Posts from November 2007

English Experts

Posted by Transparent Language No Comments
Nov 8 2007

EE.gifThis really fantastic blog for Brazilians learning English is quickly gaining steam.

Over the past few months I have gotten to know (and respect) Alessandro Brandão, the publisher of English Experts. English Experts has been around for over a year, and as of late has been receiving much praise in the online community. Alessandro was recently featured by BBC Online as their language learner of the week, the blog was recognized as the 11th Most Read Blog in Brazil, and is currently the featured site on the illustrious Tecla SAP. Parabens, Alessandro!

Alessandro has a crack staff of contributors (myself included) that post articles explaining the finer points of Portuguese-English translation and language acquisition. I really recommend that any of you who are interested check it out. There is a large (over 3500) subscriber base that is eager to discuss these topics in English and Portuguese. It can be a great resource, especially to the more intrepid Portuguese learners.

As some of you may have figured out, this very blog (Portuguese Blog) is subscribed to by a fair number of Brazilians (Olá galera!!!) who use it as a way to learn new expressions in English. Very crafty indeed… of course since I provide the English next to the Portuguese, it is actually a great resource for both English and Portuguese speakers learning the other language. English Experts is useful in exactly the same way.

Portuguese Treebank

Posted by Transparent Language No Comments
Nov 8 2007


Here’s one for the linguistics enthusiasts out there!

A treebank, according to Wiki…

…is a text corpus in which each sentence has been annotated with syntactic structure. Syntactic structure is commonly represented as a tree structure, hence the name treebank. Treebanks can be used in corpus linguistics for studying syntactic phenomena or in computational linguistics for training or testing parsers.

Simple, right?

Seriously though, this is cool stuff. I have sort of a peripheral interest in social linguistics and computational linguistics, and though I don’t have much direct use for these tools, I recognize that having a corpus and a treebank for a given language opens up a lot of doors. Say you want to record a conversation, then analyze it syntactically; a treebank would allow you to feed a transcription of the recording into a parser.

Ok, ok this is pretty esoteric stuff admittedly. What does this have to do with Portuguese? Good question…

I found this Portuguese Treebank and wanted to share it with you, meus caros leitores.

Obrigado

Posted by Transparent Language 46 Comments
Nov 7 2007


Obrigado means thank you in Portuguese.

The first word many people learn in Portuguese, obrigado is certainly extremely useful.

Since the word is the past participle of the verb obrigar, it is necessary to use the appropriate gender of the word. Males should say obrigado and females ought to use obrigada. As one might imagine, this is a common mistake among beginner Portuguese learners.

Some have speculated that the word obrigado is cognate with the Japanese word for thank you, arigatou (gozaimasu). I’ve heard this one a lot; let me save you a lot of hassle and debate: there is no such connection, though some insist that there is. As I understand it, the coincidence is really amazing; beyond sounding exactly alike, and being commonly used for the same purpose, arigatou and obrigado have even another level of commonality. Arigatou “…is based on two
Chinese characters, one meaning “difficult” and the other “to be”. In other words, I’m so indebted to you, I’m having a hard time even existing over here…” [source].

Given that obrigado literally means ‘I am obligated [to you],’ the coincidence is really spooky. One word derives from Latin (obligare) and the other from ancient Japanese, and yet the two words sound almost the same, literally mean close to the same thing which in both cases is different from the common usage of the word, which is the same for both words. Wow.

False Friend: “Advertência”

Posted by Transparent Language No Comments
Nov 6 2007


Advertência does not mean Advertisement

The word advertência actually means warning in Portuguese. In order to say advertisement, use either anúncio or propaganda.

Priberam

Posted by Transparent Language No Comments
Nov 6 2007

Priberam.gifPriberam Informática is an irreplaceable online resource for the Portuguese language

You may have noticed there aren’t a lot of traditional resources such as expansive, accurate dictionaries and grammar reference. Though this can be frustrating perhaps to the beginning student, once you know your way around the language a bit (i.e. are able to read resources that themselves are in Portuguese) a whole world opens up. At the absolute top of the list of such Portuguese-language resources is Priberam.

An online Portuguese-to-Portuguese dictionary, grammar reference and even a correction function(!), Priberam is really like nothing else out there on the web.

Consider bookmarking it or saving it with del.icio.us for frequent use. Your Portuguese will improve as a result.

There are days when I literally have Priberam open all day. Some of my Brazilian friends like to (I think perhaps intentionally) use long, poetic words that I have never heard before. For this and many other situations, Priberam is a trusty companion. Check it out.

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