More about Portuguese language

I'll confess that I haven't listened to my Portuguese conversation lessons for the past week—I never got beyond lesson 12 of the 16. I've been too busy, and the shorter my time here gets, the less motivation there is to get back to the next lesson. But I have learned some things about the language recently.

Portuguese apparently has the greatest number of phonemes of any of the Romance languages (for those of you who never took linguistics 101, a phoneme is a meaningful unit of sound, a difference in sound that makes a difference in meaning). This helps to explain my frustration with the unpredictability of pronunciation. Unlike Spanish, Italian, and even French, you cannot reliably tell how to pronounce a Portuguese word from the way it is spelled. All those diacritical marks on the vowels mark differences that are very difficult for the American-English ear to detect, whereas in Spanish, particularly, each vowel has a single value. The classic example is the difference between grandfather (avô) and grandmother (avó). Judith Hoffnagel, who has lived here over 30 years, says she still can't tell the difference in running speech.

This claim about the phonemic variety of Portuguese was told to me by Eddie Edmundson, a British native who has lived in Latin America for much of his life, working with British cultural organizations and now retired. His wife, Verônica, was in my class at UFPE. The two of them took Chuck, Carl, and me on a tour of Olinda and Recife last Friday. Here's a picture of the five of us on on the patio of the Catedral da Sé in Olinda, with Recife in the distant background.One other feature makes Portuguese unique among the Romance languages, and that is the fact that it doesn't use the pagan names for the days of the week. In Spanish, for example, lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes refer to the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jove, and Venus, as do the English names (though ours refer to the Germanic names for the gods). Instead, Portuguese calls Monday the "second-feast," segunda-feira, the second day after Sunday, domingo, the lord's day, and so on, except for Saturday, which remains sábado, the sabbath. These names come from the medieval church calendar, apparently from the time of Pope Sylvester I (314–335), who determined that Sunday, the day of the resurrection, was the first day of the week, and Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, was to be a day on which Christians execrate the Jews. Why Portuguese retained these church names for the days and the other Romance languages did not, I haven't been able to discover.

There's an interesting website about the history and dialects of Portuguese from a larger site called Orbis Latinus, about Romance languages.