Buses: The Noble Institution, or Portuguese: The Pragmatic Language

Dear Blog,

Hello readers (yes, I'm not actually writing to the blog, but am communicating through the blog to you all - I thought it was time I came out with it), it's time once again for me to pollute cyberspace with a disastrously extemporaneous and hopelessly disorganized and unedited blog entry. And once again, I have perhaps jumped the gun in revealing to you the subject of this blog in the title.

So to explain the first topic, I'll give you some background. I've been in school for three weeks now, and for the past two and a half weeks I have been riding the bus home. But unlike wimpy high schools in the U.S., there is no special school bus to bear you home - there is an actual municipal bus stop next to the school, and you must ride a city bus home. I consider my time busing to be some of the most valuable time I spend here in Brasil (hey! I do too have a life...) - in any context, it is a fascinating portrait of people and social tendencies. But unfortunately, it usually paints a rather cynical picture of society. For example, whenever a double seat opens up, a person will always take the aisle seat - this seems fairly innocent, but I once heard a BBC story on the radio about how people will do this to discourage others from taking the other seat. Also, I believe a motive may be so that if someone does sit next to them, they won't have to climb over them when they want to get up. So it is an almost primeval atmosphere on the bus, especially at stops, when one is always watching where the new people will go - will they sit next to me? will they stand next to me? But it's all very according to plan - the open seats get taken, and every standing spot gets filled up almost scientifically maximizing space between people.

But compared to interesting aspects, all this sociology business is quite uninteresting and dry. You readers and your expectations of intellectual and academic material (brilliant though it may be, coming from me) - I'm quite sick of it frankly, and I refuse to suffer your boring demands. No more, no more. So now let us defy you and move to the lighter side of busing. Although people may be confined to the strictest of social mores on a bus, the trained eye can notice the individual humanity of one's fellow passengers in great relief than almost anywhere else. Of course I don't mean personality - one would need to interact with them to see that (which is of course punishable by defenstration on buses). What I refer to is a more esoteric idea - the experience of being driven about by a stranger, surrounded by strangers, in the bumpiest of fashions gives one a great sense of fellowship with those around you. You're all going to different places, but for now chance has brought you all together to spend these few minutes in silent contemplation of the meaning of things; and you're all connected by the same helplessness, the same faith in the laws of probability that you will not be the next ones everyone sees from a camera in a helicopter hovering above your burning symbol of broken innocence and betrayal. Public transportation is indeed like sharing a womb with 20 strangers.

Which I probably wouldn't appreciate as much if I shared their language. Being an outsider givers you a whole new objectivity and clarity about such things. But unfortunately I may not have that for much longer, for my brain seems insistant upon me slowly and painfully learning Portuguese. It's gotten so bad I can even converse to a limited degree. Luckily I still don't know most of the basic articles or the rules for past tense and gender. I also still can't understand my teachers or speak with proper grammar, but my hopes for a year of ignorance seem to have faded almost entirely; I doubt there will be a single person that I won't be able to understand by the end of the year. I shall have to go searching for college lectures on metaphyisics just for some words that are way over my head, I shouldn't wonder. But as long as I'm learning the language, I may as well satirize it, right? Right. So, I may as well begin where the second title of my blog left off. I call Portuguese a pragmatic language, but this is really more in reference to the people and how they speak it. A Rotarian once told me that Portuguese is a very difficult language, and that even most Brazilians don't speak it correctly. I thought that even if every Brazilian speaks broken Portuguese, it can't be that broken, and in that case, even proper Portuguese must be pretty austere. But what do I mean by all this? A legit question, although you could have worded it more nicely. I mean that a Brazilian can express in two words what an American or Englishman or Australian even would need four or five words for. For example, if in English you wanted to say "I'll be back soon," in Portuguese you would only need to say "Volta logo." Or if you wanted to say, "Do I need this?" you would only need "Preciso?" Even if it's not entirely correct (which, coming from me, is more than likely), a Brazilian would both understand you and not think twice about how correct you were (keep also in mind that although Portuguese is simple, you must say it correctly to be understood, which is why I have yet to have any luck communicating with strangers who aren't accustomed to my horrid accent and broken-beyond-even-their-standards Portuguese).

Now let me for a moment discuss the more general aspects of Portuguese. The sound of it is similar to Spanish, as I (and no doubt you all) suspected, but it is a far deeper and more interesting language, in my opinion. It's not all flash and speed and rrrrrrrolled R's (luckily, since my record for consecutive R's rolled is two); it's a much more subtle language, with much softer sounds. Much of Spanish happens at or right behind the lips - all the sounds are very straightforward and sharp. In Portuguese, everything happens, relatively, about a foot further back. All the vowels are much nasalier - and often they will bend them into a different vowel altogether (for example, "novo" sounds a lot like "naw-vee," and "grande" sounds like "gruhng-uh") - and the consonants are much more "tonguey." Now let me explain "tonguey" (I'm not apologizing, just explaining). Often, when they use the letter T they will change the sound to CH, and when they use the letter S they will change it to SH or ZH (you know what that is - try it and all will become clear), and when they use D they change it to G. For example: tipo is pronounced chipo, desculpe is pronounced dishculp, and cidade is pronounced cidaj. But there are also other consonantal oddities worth divulging, particularly that of the letter M. Whenever M appears at the end of a word, it is almost always pronounced like NG. I have absolutely no explanation as to why they did this - I think the Portuguese were perhaps simply the linguistic equivalent to impressionists. Back when Spanish and Portuguese were basically one language, the Soon-to-be-Portuguese said to the Soon-to-be-Spaniards, "Look here, we've had enough of all this 'strict interpretation of letters' business. Phonetics is more than just what's on the page - it's what's in your mind! An M sound is no more than an NG sound with a veil of lips, and a D sound is nothing more than a G sound that's been confined to a prison cell between the teeth and the tongue, by the likes of you, no doubt!" And so the strict-interpretation Spaniards separated from the artistically-inclined Portuguese and each went their separate ways; and I have become a happy inheritent of that rift - despite the well-hidden reasoning behind pronunciation, I feel a close kinship with the forefathers of the language, and would like to think that, should a similar movement develop within the English language, I would be on the forefront, advocating it. And as I end this blog entry, let me silence all you naysayers before you materialize in your devilish fashion, who would point out that I just made up that whole history of the language - strict interpretation of reality is just as heinous as strict interpretation of language, and I warn you to cease this foolishness before I send my flying poodle-shaped monkey to put you in your place.