EP word of the week (#61): parque de campismo

A good chunk of people choose August as their preferred vacation month; not all people have the privilege of taking the full month off (most companies require that employees take some vacation days at other times of year to take sure they’re still getting work done on the summer months), and some people can’t even go on vacation, but those who do go like to take a week or two either in July or August to enjoy themselves in the ways they see fit.

Some people take it to the beach, others go to the countryside (August is also the month chosen by many emigrants to return to Portugal to visit their families, which means a big influx of people to small towns and villages around the country), and many just turn to nature to find a bit of both.

For that purpose, we have [os] parques de campismo, which are multipurpose camping sites. Some are near seaside or riverside beaches, others are perched on hills, and they may vary according to the services provided: some have build-in infrastructure (such as bathrooms and public showers), others do not; others also work simply as trailer parks for people with RVs/caravans, others have bungalows and a few more will have the common wilderness areas where people can actually camp outside with tents.

Parque de Campismo Rural de Aboim da Nóbrega (distrito de Braga). Rural camping park of Aboim da Nóbrega (Braga district).

 

EP word of the week (#60): relva

If a beach or a pool is not readily available, spending some time at a park or garden is always a good way to relax and enjoy the sun (Portuguese has a saying/proverb that goes O sol quando nasce é para todos, which roughly means “When it rises, the sun is for everyone” [i.e. everyone can enjoy it in roughly the same way] or “When the sun rises, it rises for everyone”).

Interesting enough, while the words for sun ([o] Sol) and beach ([a] praia) are the same everyone, the word for grass is not. EP uses the word [a] relva, while BP uses the word [a] grama (different from the shared word [o] grama, gram, unit of weight).

The words for grassy fields (such as a football/soccer pitch) are vary accordingly; in EP, [o] relvado; in BP, [o] gramado.

EP word of the week (#59): metro

Following from last week’s post, here’s another interesting word where minute changes in phonetics and spelling make for an interesting look at EP vs. BP differences. I’m talking about [o] metro, which is the common abbreviation of [o] metropolitano, metro/subway (I did tell you I was a fan of trains!).

In Brazil, the word is turned into [o] metrô – just like sumo/sumô from last week. I believe this change occurred to better match its pronunciation with the equivalent syllables in the word metropolitano from which it derives.

A more thorough explanation of the phonological processes at play we show up after the jump! (It has a really nice vowel chart and coloured arrows! You should really check it out!)

Estação do Metro das Olaias (Lisboa). Olaias subway/metro station (part of Lisbon’s metro system).

EP word of the week (#58): sumo

Our short foray into beverages best served cold ends today with the Portuguese word for juice, [o] sumo.

As those of you who’ve spend some time with the Duolingo (Brazilian) Portuguese course already know, Brazilians use a different word for the drinkable juices (the ones you can buy or make to drink yourself), [o] suco.

While I’ve heard that some Brazilians make a distinction between juice as a by-product of squeazing/grinding fruit and as a drink/liquid used to flavor food, and occasionally using sumo for the former, that doesn’t seem to be set in stone. In any case, when it comes to European Portuguese, [o] sumo is used for all meanings – but there are ways you can tell the different between a juiced fruit and a beverage:

• In a recipe, juices are usually labeled using numerals [i.e. the amount of fruit you’ll need to use to make a certain quantity of juice]: an example of a recipe instruction could be: “exprema o sumo de meia laranja para dentro da mistura” (trans. “squeeze the juice of half an orange into the mixture”);

• The beverage follows the pattern (in food and drinks) of adding the main ingredient[s] as a partitive element separated from the more generic noun with de: o sumo de morango (strawberry juice); o sumo de laranja (orange juice); o sumo de pêssego (peach juice).

• We also have a word for lemonade, [a] limonada, which sets it apart from regular lemon juice (since lemonade has added sugar).

P.S. Other plant secretions and or by-products have different names: for example, sap – the fluid secreted by plant stems, is known as [a] seiva, resin is [a] resina, and pollen is [o] pólen.

EP word of the week (#57): desporto

To commemorate the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics, what better way than to have a special EP Words of the Week segment meant to celebrate the different words for sport[s] between Brazilian and European Portuguese?

In EP, the word we use is [o] desporto; in BP, the word they use is [o] esporte. This obviously affects words that are derived from these nouns; just to give one example, EP uses the adjective desportivo/a to make reference to sports-associated items ([o] clube desportivo – sports club), while its Brazilian counterpart is esportivo/a.

EP word of the week (#56): ice tea

For once, EP Word of the Week plays it completely straight with a word; [o] ice tea means exactly what you’d expect it to be: iced tea!

It’s simply another example of an English borrowing that stuck in Portugal, so much so that the actual Portuguese words for ice[d] tea, [o] chá gelado, are almost never used when one is talking about mass brand ice tea.

But as always, there’s a lesson to be learned here: if you look closely, you’ll notice that the masculine gender of the Portuguese word for tea ([o] chá) helps explain why [o] ice tea is masculine in Portuguese.

Grammar Tips (#20): Possessives in EP

The full range of possessive adjectives and pronouns in EP is as follows:

Referent subject pronoun	Possessive adjectives (prepositioned) / pronouns	Special cases (postpositioned)
Eu	meu[s] / minha[s]
Tu	teu[s] / tua[s]
Você	seu[s] / sua[s]
Ele		dele
Ela		dela
Nós	nosso[s] / nossa[s]
Vocês	vosso[s] / vossa[s]¹
Eles	seu[s] / sua[s]	deles
Elas		delas

Note: on the middle column, masculine adjectives/pronouns are to the left of the slash, with their feminine counterparts to the right

¹ If you found this website via Duolingo or another BP language learning software, please take note of how vosso[s]/vossa[s] is used as the possessive of vocês in EP (in BP, the third person seu[s]/sua[s] is used).