The answer provided by Peter J. Wright is pretty much what you want: it covers most important aspects. I only want to add two more and improve a bit on some of his topics.
- Portuguese (especially Brazilian) is one of the only two major Romance languages (the other one being Spanish) which has suffered extensive influence from non-Indo European languages.
- The influences in question were from two African languages (Kimbundu and Yoruba) and one Amerindian language (Tupi). Like Spanish and Sicilian, Portuguese also had a strong Arabic influence. The impact of that language on Spanish is greater than on Portuguese, but adds to the compound.
- The only other Romance language with such a strong foreign influence is Romanian (which used to have more than 60% of words from Slavic roots, but have since replaced most of them with either Italian or French loanwords).
- The affricate allophones are influenced by (but not directly taken from) Yoruba and Kimbundu.
- Most Romance languages feature affrication of stops since the late Roman period, Portuguese only added more. It is arguable that Portuguese could have evolved affrication without African influence.
- The strong nasalisation is an artefact of Tupi. In Tupi there are two series of vowels and of phonemes, which are usually represented in scholarly spelling like this:
- Oral series: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý
- Nasal series: ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ, ỹ
- Oral semivowels: î (j), û (gu), ŷ (yes, a third semivowel, mind-blown)
- Nasal semivowels were represented like the oral ones, nasalisation was implicit wherever a nasal stop consonant appeared.
- Oral stops: p, t, k, g (glottal stop)
- Nasal stops: mb, nd, ng, ng (voiced glottal stop)
- Fully nasal consonants: m, n, ñ (nh) and ng (syllable coda only).
- Oral fricatives: s, x, h
- Nasal fricative: b (w)
- As you can see from above, nasalisation was very prevalent in Tupi and also very phonemic. Nasalisation, like tones, make a word mean something else: py and pỹ are different words. Tupi nasalisation also produced a rudimentary phonetic harmony, in which a nasal consonant would nasalise the previous vowel and the next consonant: “ñe.’ẽ.nga + ka.tu → ñeengatu”.
- The complex pronunciation of the “r” reflects different influences. The rolled “r” from the São Paulo region is from Tupi, but the lax “r” of the Rio de Janeiro region evolved on its own. By the way, rolled “r” does not extend all the way down to the Southern border. It is a feature of the central Brazilian dialect, which is spoken by about half of the Brazilian population, and is found in the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul and Minas Gerais (in the regions bordering São Paulo and Goiás).
- Vocalisation of “l” in syllable coda is Brazilian innovation, but it is not an unheard-of feature. Some Slavic languages, like Polish and Kashubian, do feature this (the Polish slashed “l” → Ł).
- Apart from pronunciation, Brazilian Portuguese shows some creole features, like grammar simplification (in our case, verbal inflection and pronoun collocation) and influence of local substrate on morphology. Some of these features are not too evident because the Portuguese have adopted some of them too, even before Brazilian independence.
- And there’s the case for vocabulary. There is simply a lot of vocabulary in Brazilian Portuguese that’s completely alien to the common romance stock, and even the common Indo-European stock. We know by funny outlandish names a lot of things the Portuguese know by common romance words:
- vulture → urubu or abutre
- squirrel → caxinguelê or esquilo
- manatee → boto or manati
- pineapple → abacaxi or ananás
- buttocks → bunda or nádegas
- popcorn → pipoca (this one has been adopted in Portugal, though it is of Tupi origin, a word that means “which explodes in your hand”).
Summing it all up, Brazilian Portuguese sounds and looks a lot alien because it is far removed from Europe and remained isolated for about 150 years. I guess Brazilian Portuguese sounds, to the ears of a French or Italian person, as divergent from European Portuguese as Jamaican relative to the Queen’s English.
First of all, Brazilian Portuguese phonology possesses nasalized vowels and diphthongs. Not even French has nasalized diphthongs.
Then it's phonology boasts very complicated allophonic rules for the phonemes “d,” “l,” “r, “s” and “t.”
These rules dictate that the letters “d” and “t” are palatilized before phonetic “i” into /ʤ/ and /ʧ/, and another allophonic rule dictates that unstressed “e” be pronounced /i/, which therefore triggers the regressive palatalization rule for the above consonants, so that a word such as “diferente” (“different”) is pronounced as /ʤife’re̴ʧi/. This renders words like this completely unrecognizable to speakers of other Romance languages. However, this palatalization rule does not apply in some regions, such as Bahia in the Northeastern corner of the country.
BP’s allophonic rule governing the letter “r,” also varies from region to region. In Rio de Janeiro, initial, pre-consonantal and final “r” are realized as /h/, but can for some speakers (especially the renowned Brazilian singer, Maria Bethânia) be realized as /χ/ in all appropriate positions. However, this rule never applies across word boundaries.
Therefore:
“rio” (“river”) > /hiu/
“certeza” (“certainty”) > /sεh’tεzə/
“fazer” (“to do”) > /faz’εh/
“fazer isso” (“to do that”) > /faz’εɾ ‘isu/
In São Paulo, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, pre-consonantally and finally, it is realized and a rhotic “r” as in English, but as a flap /ɾ/ across word boundaries.
In the last-named areas, “s” is not realized as /ʃ/ as in the rest of Brazil in all positions where it would otherwise be /ʃ/ except in the instance in which the regressive palatization rule is applied to “d” and “t,” in which case it does becomes /ʃ/:
“esta” (“this” fem.) > /’εstə/, but
“este” (“this” masc.) > /’eʃʧi/.
Lastly, final “l” > /u/ pre-consonantally and word-finally, but does not cross word boundaries.
“o sol” (“the sun”) > /u sou/
“voltar” (“to return”) > /vou’tah/
“é difícil estar” (“it is hard to be”) > /ε ʤifi’sil iʃ’tah/.
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