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Date Posted: 05:43:54 04/11/07 Wed
Author: Filomeno Issenguel
Subject: Re: Task One Group Three
In reply to: Adriana 's message, "Task One Group Three" on 06:07:08 04/08/07 Sun

UFMG
Faculdade de Letras
Disciplina: Inglês – Produção de Textos
Professor: Adriana Maria Tenuta de Azevedo
Aluno: Filomeno Issenguel


Step 1
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Brazilian Language

”The evolution of Brazilian Portuguese has certainly been influenced by the languages it supplanted: first the Amerind tongues of the natives, then the various African languages brought by the slaves, and finally the speeches of the European and Asian immigrants. The influence is clearly detected in the Brazilian Portuguese lexicon, which today is full of words of Tupi-guarani, Yorubá origin, among others.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese)


In Brazil, people speak a dialect of the Portuguese language. About 188 million inhabitants of Brazil and a couple million Brazilian immigrants, mainly in United States, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay are able to speak the dialect. Although, the dialect has many similarities with Portuguese, Brazilian are not considered speakers of Portuguese.

The differences between Portuguese from Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese are approximately comparable to British and American English, although some claim they are much greater especially considering the differences in Brazilian and Portuguese grammar. The Brazilian formal written standard, which is defined by law and by international agreements with other Portuguese-speaking countries, is very similar to the European one; but there are nevertheless many differences in spelling, lexicon and grammar.

The Brazilian spellings of certain words differ from those used in Portugal and the other Portuguese-speaking countries. Some of these differences are merely orthographical, but others reflect true differences in pronunciation.
A major subset of the differences relates to words with c and p followed by c, ç or t. In many cases, the letters c or p have become silent in all varieties of Portuguese, a common phonetic change in Romance languages (cf. Spanish objeto, French objet). Accordingly, they stopped being written down in BP, but are still written in other countries. For example, we have EP acção / BP ação ("action"), EP óptimo / BP ótimo ("optimum"), and so on, where the consonant is silent both in BP and in EP, but the words are spelled differently. Only in a small number of words is the consonant silent in Brazil and pronounced elsewhere, or vice-versa.

However BP has retained those "silent" consonants in a few cases, such as detectar ("to detect"). In particular, BP generally distinguishes in sound and writing between secção ("section" as in anatomy or drafting) and seção ("section" of an organization); whereas EP uses secção for both senses.
Another major set of differences is the BP usage of ô or ê in many words where EP has ó or é, such as BP neurônio / EP neurónio ("neuron") and BP arsênio / EP arsénio. These spelling differences are due to genuinely different pronunciations. In EP, the vowels e and o may be open (é or ó) or closed (ê or ô) when they are stressed before one of the nasal consonants m, n followed by a vowel, but in BP they are always close in this environment. The variant spellings are necessary in those cases because the general Portuguese spelling rules mandate a stress diacritic in those words, and the Portuguese diacritics also encode vowel quality.

The vocabularies of Brazilian and European Portuguese also differ in a couple of thousand words, many of which refer to concepts that were introduced separately in BP and EP.

Since the Brazilian independence in 1822, BP has tended to borrow words from English and French. However, BP generally adopts foreign words with minimal adjustments, while EP tends to apply deeper morphological changes. However, there are instances of BP transliterating English words, whereas EP retains the original form - hence estoque and stock. Finally, one dialect often borrowed a word while the other coined a new one from native elements. So one has, for example
“BP mouse ← English "mouse" versus EP rato ← literal translation of "mouse" in Portugal, but means "rat" in Brazil
BP esporte (alternatives: desporto, desporte) ← English "sport" versus EP desporto ← Spanish deporte
BP jaqueta ← English "jacket" versus EP blusão ← EP blusa ← French blouse
BP concreto ← English "concrete" versus EP betão ← French beton
BP grampeador ("stapler") ← grampo ← German Krampe versus EP agrafador ← agrafo ← French agrafe.”
"A few other examples are given in the following table:
Brazil Portugal English
Abridor de latas abre-latas can opener
AIDS SIDA AIDS
Breque, freio Travão, freio Brake
Time, equipe equipa, equipe Team
Favela bairro de lata slum quarters
Ferrovia caminho de ferro Railway
Fila bicha, fila line (US), queue (UK)
Fones de ouvido Auscultadores,auriculares, fones Headphones
Secretária eletrônica Atendedor de chamadas answering machine
Trem Comboio Train

Some words, which are often mistakenly given as examples of dialectal lexical differences, actually do not denote the same concepts. For example: "abacaxi" and "ananás" designate two different kinds of pineapple; "grama" often refers to any kind of grass in a garden or urban area whereas "relva" or "relvado" refers to natural grass of forests, etc.

The Portuguese language makes extensive use of verbs in the progressive tense, almost as in English. BP seldom has the present continuous construct estar a + infinitive, which, in contrast, has become quite common in EP. In BP, the present continuous must be expressed by estar + gerund. Thus Brazilians will always write ela está dançando ("she is dancing"), never ela está a dançar. The same restriction applies to several other uses of the gerund: BP always writes ficamos conversando ("we kept on talking") and ele trabalha cantando ("he sings while he works"), never ficamos a conversar and ele trabalha a cantar as is the case in most varieties of EP.
It must be noted, however, that BP retains the combination a + infinitive for uses that are not related to continued action, such as voltamos a correr ("we went back to running"), and that some dialects of EP will also tend to use estar + gerund in the same way as Brazilians.


Bibliography
· Azevedo, Milton. 2005. "Portuguese. A linguistic introduction". Cambridge University Press.
· Bagno, Marcos. "Português ou Brasileiro? (Portuguese or Brazilian?)" http://paginas.terra.com.br/educacao/marcosbagno/
· Módolo, Marcelo. "As duas línguas do Brasil. (Two languages of Brazil)" Editora FAUUSP.
· Perini, Mário. 2002. "Modern Portuguese. A Reference Grammar." Yale University Press. New Haven.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

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