One of the sessions in the past two weeks fell on my birthday, and I got the chance to learn a lot about what it is like to celebrate a birthday in Brazil! As we both have a bit of a sweet tooth, we talked a lot about food, desserts in particular. There is a certain type of small, round sweet made from condensed milk called a brigadeiro which is my language instructor’s favorite. Funnily enough, my mom surprised me with a big birthday party in a box, and she had actually made me some brigadeiros without knowing that we had just talked about them in class. I have not tried the real thing, the real brigadeiro straight from Brazil, so I’m not sure how much I can evaluate them, but I can certainly say they are very sweet. They are very similar to a truffle size, but more sweet than rich, and usually with sprinkles. I look forward to trying them should I ever visit Brazil. Until then, I am looking forward to going back home and being able to try my hand at making them myself.
This week from the textbook, we practiced some irregular verbs like poder and ter (to be able to and to have, respectively). I find these difficult as I am not too comfortable with many verbs in Portuguese. I need to practice my conjugations and my tenses because even though I almost always get them correct when I guess, I am slow and not confident because I get them confused with French and Spanish. While Portuguese generally has the most crossover with Spanish, the amount of vowel usage is very French. We also practiced the different “r” sounds that Portuguese has, per my request. Also, much like French, Portuguese has a pretty distinct “r” among the Romance languages. Nothing so complicated as the American [ɹ], but the Portuguese written “r” can be pronounced a handful of different ways. There is the more standard tap [ɾ], such as in Spanish, but there is great variety in the two other main /r/ sounds. The first is written as /rr/ but the same phoneme can also be written as /r/ when it is at the beginning of the word and sometimes when it is between two vowels, but not always in the intervocalic instances. Speakers in the South will roll it sometimes like the trilled [r], but generally it is a fricative and close to an aspirated “h” sound that I learned in Arabic, close to [χ]. When /r/ appears at the end of a word, it is sometimes dropped entirely, pronounced like the American [ɹ] (a sociolinguistic element mentioned in the book), or like [h].
I was so excited to see a section in the book about sociolinguistics, even if it was a brief overview in many ways, I’m sure. I learned that the rural people of Brazil called caipiras who are a generally mountainous group and have their own holiday, festival or celebration in Brazil. During this festival, people will put on cowboy hats, hang colored bits of paper, and dance in traditional caipira fashion.
Comments
Happy late birthday, Sabrina! That's cool that you were able to talk about birthdays in Brazil. I admit that I also have a sweet tooth, so I enjoyed learning about these desserts. Brigadeiros sound delicious! That was very sweet of your mom to send you some. I hope you do get to celebrate your birthday there one day:)