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Future outlook: French vs. Portuguese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| espejismo Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5052 days ago 498 posts - 905 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani | Message 41 of 81 22 January 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Umm, what exactly are you prophesying about? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4701 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 42 of 81 23 January 2012 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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As a Brazilian, my opinion on this issue will be biased, especially when I talk about the almost illusory linguistic union. But I'll try my best to answer it objectively. Anyone willing to present arguments against mine are welcome, especially because what comes next is a matter of intense polemic and debate among Portuguese language speakers. To whoever reads this, please don't make my post your only source of information. Read what others have said and make up your own opinion.
As a whole, Portuguese language isn't that useful. The gap between "European Portuguese" and "Brazilian Portuguese" is wide - thus, I disagree with Carlucio, for example. In the countries of Africa that use Portuguese language, only about 50% of the population speaks Portuguese (in a variety that is much closer to European Portuguese). So, "European Portuguese" is geographically more widespread, but it's economic significance is close to null (neither Portugal, nor Angola, nor Mozambique, nor Guinea-Bissau are doing well, are they? Macau is doing fine, but the dictatorial Chinese government is forcing everyone to speak Mandarin there, so it doesn't count as a vote for Portuguese in a longer term). Brazil has a much greater economic potential and more speakers, but if you choose to study Brazilian Portuguese, you will be geographically restricted to a single continent and a single country. However, so are Chinese, Japanese and Italian, and this has never discouraged any serious students of those languages - it's economical potential and NOT the geography that makes a language useful. If you think European Portuguese is more beautiful, more charming and sounds better (as it arguably is) that's a fairly good reason to study it. But being brutally honest, if you choose to study "European Portuguese" just because it's more widespread geographically, you are making a poor choice, for the reasons I said above. Geography is not usefulness. I'm afraid to say that the differences between those two major varieties are enormous - I disagree with Carlucio. If I, as a Br-Pt speaker, have to pay close attention to understand what a Portuguese guy is saying, a foreign learner of the language may suffer a lot more. Honestly, a few years ago, when I contributed to Wikipedia - which keeps a single version for both varieties-, I was against calling the two varieties two different languages. I'm not sure if I still keep this optimistic pro-union feeling anymore, especially after the tremendous resistance in unifying the spelling where the differences are merely minor - not to say that the syntax, pronunciation and culture have already split a long time ago, and there's no way one can deny this. If anyone is willing to counter my argument, I'm willing to give more at least two MAJOR reasons for each of those points. Again, I am not talking about nitpicking differences, as in spelling, where differences are shallow enough to allow people from Portugal and Brazil read the same books, as some people mentioned in this thread - I'm talking about big differences here. I'm talking about differences that would severely discourage even the most serious student. But I think the outlook for French is worse. It will retain it's chic factor, as it has even after English displaced it as lingua franca. French will be spoken in more countries as well. BUT, economically, Portuguese (or, shall I specify, only its Brazilian variety) will be more important. France's GDP per capita will be larger, but hey, people are learning Chinese for business, even with China's GDP per capita being ridiculously small (it's smaller than Brazil's GPD per capita, for instance). So for businesses it's economic weight (total GDP), NOT life quality in the countries where a language is spoken that really matters (Norway has a high life quality and I don't see many people learning Norwegian). And I don't see how those African countries, in which French is only one of many languages, will be major players in the economical arena in the next decades. So, French will almost surely be surpassed by Portuguese when it comes to absolute economic power, even if Brazil never reaches the status of a highly-developed nation. So I'll cast my vote in Portuguese, although I must emphasize I'm not talking about all varieties of it. Only "Brazilian Portuguese" or, excuse my neologism, "Brazilian Language" (because I no longer see the two as one language) has good prospects and may beat French as a important language. The European variety of the language has slim chances of doing the same. If this was an option in this poll, I would restrict my vote to "Brazilian Portuguese" only, not to the collection of languages/dialects/accents that people call vaguely as "Portuguese", the "Portuguese language as a whole". If the languages were united, there would be a great deal of synergy and all the countries and students involved would benefit. I don't think this is the case. But your mileage may vary. P.S.: No offenses are intended to the dear ones who speak the European variety. Let me make it clear: I do appreciate your accent, your words and your syntax. When I grew up, I read books written in "European Portuguese", and last year, I enjoyed reading "A Cidade e as Serras", which was written by a Portuguese author (Eca de Queiros). I enjoy Fernando Pessoa, memorized "Amor" from Camoes, and I was truly sad the day I heard Saramago had died (all of these being Portuguese authors). But in this forum we're talking to people who will choose to learn the language because of it's usefulness and economic potential. So I don't think it's fair to sugar coat the reality and keep the romantic view that "we all speak the same language, just with a different flavor". I really like Jostein Gaarder, which is a Norwegian author, but I wouldn't study Norwegian myself. Taste is not usefulness. Edited by Acut on 23 January 2012 at 6:56am 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4750 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 43 of 81 23 January 2012 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I agree with Acut.
At many European Universities you can get a degree in either Brasilianistics (Brazilian Studies; Brazilian Portuguese) or Lusitanistics (Portuguese Studies; Continental Portuguese). It's more practical to learn it separately, especially when it comes to translation skills. Portuguese people say our movies and sitcoms as well as soap operas are ''incorrect'' Portuguese, and they translate Paulo Coelho's books in Portugal because they consider our grammar usage poor and found our vocabulary pesky. The unity of Portuguese is maintained only because our politicians keep the diglossia alive, we aren't allowed to use Brazilian grammar in writing (like Me chamo, Chego em)...our written language is based on 19th century Continental Portuguese, albeit with a modern spelling. But compare Brazilian and Portuguese mesolects (=language that is neither dialectal or overly formal), the grammar usage and vocabulary choice is so distinct as if we talked of two close but different Romance languages (spoken Brazilian is as far from spoken Continental Portuguese, as spoken Galician is from spoken Continental Portuguese)... In Portugal people prefer reading in English to reading translations from English into Brazilian Portuguese. They find our usage too pesky. They could also be a bit less cranky and choosy. If our soap operas and sitcoms are ''lousy Portuguese, full of mistakes'' why do they keep importing them and watching them. It makes no sense. Brazilian Portuguese has 200 millions of speakers, which is like two times more than Mexican Spanish, the largest dialect of Spanish. Sooner or later you have to chose the variant/dialect you learn. Because even basic words like LINDO, GUAPO, COGER or PLATICAR are used differently in Mexico, Colombia, Spain and Argentina. COCHE GUAPO (''nice car'') used in Spain would make no sense in Argentina, because GUAPO means BRAVE and not NICE there. COGER is an insult in Argentina and Mexico, but it means to get in Spain and Colombia. PLATICAR means to chat in Mexico, but it's not used in Spain or South America. LINDO means good-looking in Colombia and Argentina, but in Spain it means CUTE and it is used only for pets or children, and not for other things. ;) Using BONITO or LINDO for people (unless they're children) is considered tacky in Spain, maybe because of the Mexican, Colombian and Argentinian soap operas in which they are used. With Brazilian Portuguese, you get a pretty uniform(ized) variant of 200 millions of speakers. Edited by Camundonguinho on 23 January 2012 at 7:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5833 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 44 of 81 23 January 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I disagree that the differences are enormous. There are some significant differences, but with some exposure and time it is not difficult to adapt to the other variety. I studied European Portuguese at college and spent 8 months in Portugal as a student. When I was there I regularly watched Brazilian telenovelas and could understand them without too many problems after about 3 months. Later I went to Brazil. Beforehand I read through a grammar of spoken Brazilian Portuguese, learnt some of the main vocabulary differences and adapted my pronunciation. Again, I was able to communicate without any problem with the Brazilians i came into contact with. They noted I spoke with more of a Portuguese accent but it didn't hinder communication. It probably is a good idea for students of the language to learn one variety at first and to gradually aim for exposure in the other variety. I don't think anybody should feel discouraged from learning the language because of the differences. In no way are the differences as great, as say between Modern Standard Arabic and an Arabic dialect. Nor would the effort needed be comparable to a Spanish speaker learning Portuguese for the first time. Edited by stelingo on 23 January 2012 at 9:22pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6660 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 45 of 81 24 January 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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More people are learning Portuguese today than were learning it years ago. However, French has an incredible head start. A person who wants to be a polyglot is more likely to be expected to know French than to know Portuguese, and French-speakers may be found on an official and unofficial basis in many places. I think both languages have bright futures.
One possible scenario for the not-too-distant future is that some language that isn't so widely studied now will become fashionable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 46 of 81 24 January 2012 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Depends on your scale for "not-too-distant". If that's within the next decade, unfortunately, I can't really see that happening. The only languages that I can think of that have become significantly more fashionable over the past decade would be Mandarin and Korean. It took the former becoming the world's second largest economy and the latter becoming rapidly wealthy and using that wealth to launch a massive nationalized pop culture industry for either of their two languages to push out of obscurity. I can't really see any current countries matching the massive economic scope of China or the trendy cultural sensibility of South Korea. It's also relevant that a linguistic community facilitates its own insular domestic culture rather than passively absorbing others. The Anglosphere, the Hispanosphere, the Arab world, India, and each of the countries of East Asia are all prominent creators of contemporary popular culture, and they not only produce their own films, music, and TV shows, but they also generally aren't very interested in consuming popular culture from other linguistic communities. Conversely, it seems to me that certain other regions, like the Malay Archipelago (principally Indonesia and the Philippines) and many smaller European countries tend to enjoy other regions' popular culture on a mainstream level. And it doesn't even necessarily have anything to do with size or wealth. For example, India and the Philippines are both linguistically distinct, considerably Anglophone, demographically large, and relatively poor, but Indian cinema and music comprise 99% of what Indians see and hear, whereas very few Filipinos exclusively watch and listen to Filipino cinema and music. This suggests that Hindi, Tamil, and other major Indian languages would be more likely to be studied abroad than Tagalog, Cebuano, and other Flipino languages, given that both regions were to become wealthy and forgo English as their prestige language of education and business, in favor of their native languages. So to tie that in (for a few paragraphs I forgot about the post I was responding to, heh), I can't imagine any languages becoming even a mid-tier French, Portuguese, Mandarin, or Korean in the foreseeable future. :) I'd love if Indonesian could become that language, but people tend to look down on languages originating from regions that are currently very poor, even if they have high economic growth rates, and furthermore, Indonesians would have to start innovating their own contemporary popular culture, rather than taking cues from South Korea. Edited by nway on 24 January 2012 at 4:24am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 47 of 81 24 January 2012 at 4:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'd like to add my two cents, since it doesn't seem to be many people from this side of the ocean posting on this subject.
Same attitude here. I'll try to be objective to the best of my ability.
I tend to disagree (depends on your definition of "wide"). To my knowledge, there are more than 100,000 Brazilians currently living in Portugal. For the most part, these persons work in restaurants, stores, supermarkets, etc. For some shopping centres in the Lisbon area, the probability of finding a Brazilian on the other side of the counter is over 50%. Without communication issues.
One correction: Angola is doing very, very well. Just 20 million people, of course, but since the end of the civil war (a few years back), it's one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. And in Portugal we are aware of this, since the country is absorbing thousands of our skilled labourers.
I agree completely.
I thought you were to elaborate a bit more (the two major reasons you mentioned).
None taken, let me assure you. We're just comparing arguments.
This is definitely not true. I've been to Galicia many times and, although quite understandable, it's not at all the same thing.
Exactly. It makes no sense. Because it's not true. Brazilian soap operas are perceived here as some of the best in the world. I personally don't watch soap operas, but if I were to watch some, they would probably be Brazilian. And they are not perceived as being spoken in "lousy" Portuguese, just different.
My point exactly. I think you put it very well. Two final notes: First, let me just say that I am not in favour of the Orthographic Agreement of 1990 (no hidden agenda there). If the two versions of the language are diverging (which they are), this should not be "prevented" (for lack of a better word), least of all by such artificial means. Second, I think I learned quite a lot about the way this phenomenon is perceived in Brazil. I hope I could also contribute a little to the debate. Edited by Luso on 24 January 2012 at 4:40am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4701 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 48 of 81 24 January 2012 at 5:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oh, I'm sorry I will have to write another really long post. Anyways, the most important parts are in bold, if one only wants to skim through my post.
I can watch TV in Italian with ease, although I've never studied the language, nor lived in Italy. In fact, my family has visited Italy without speaking Italian, and we had absolutely no problems in being understood (which is similar to your experiences in Brazil). I can read texts written in Galego, and I have never studied it either. However, that doesn't mean Portuguese = Gallego = Italian. Mutual intelligibility doesn't mean linguistic union, as the many Spanish-speaking Argentinians who visit Brazil knowing no Portuguese but still being able to get around can tell. The Romance Languages tend to be very similar, and the speaker of one could easily absorb the other in a matter of months (exceptions to French and Romanian, which are fairly different). Being able to travel to a different country and having no troubles in communication does not mean one speaks that country's language - or I'd be willing to put Italian in my curriculum. Surely, a guy from Spain will have to work more than a guy from Portugal to understand/adapt to the Brazilian Portuguese - and I would be a idiot if I denied that. But that's because Br-Pt and Eu-Pt have diverged more recently (one could say since the 1800s, when Brazil got independent). Portuguese and Spanish diverged even before 1500s, which means the languages got more time to accumulate differences. Gallego diverged after Spanish, but before Brazilian Portuguese, so Eu-Pt is more different from Gallego than Br-Pt, but Gallego is closer to Eu-Pt than Spanish. Again, similarity is not unity. Also, if you have used Braziian materials during learning European Portuguese, it is even more likely you could understand Brazilian Portuguese even easier - regardless of they being two different languages. If I expose myself to an Italian TV channel I will also understand Italian better as well, even if I don't speak Italian! And the key point is: you studied a Br-Pt grammar. *If the differences were in writing only, I still count them as a sole language. English is a single language despite of its British and American spelling variants. *If the differences resided in a few words pronounced differently or in an accent, they would still be a language. So are the differences in Spanish. *If it were punctual vocabulary differences, they would be considered the same language, because those vocabulary differences are expected in any language with an expressive amount of speakers. The key difference is Grammar/Syntax. Grammatical differences are good indicators that the language is different from another. Although those differences are smoothed in very formal Br-Pt (because of a imposition, which has been receiving criticisms), they abound in spoken Br-Pt. Even educated speakers will readily abandon those European-inspired rules of formal Brazilian Portuguese in formal contexts, where you'd expect good obedience to the prescriptions of grammar. My Portuguese teachers taught those absurdly useless rules to us - but their explanations were conducted using the Brazilian syntax! A Brazilian will not use those rules in any contexts, unless they are forced to (e.g. juridical texts), but it sounds foreign! Again, it's not that those speakers are unaware of those rules (we are), but we don't use unless we really need to. It's completely OK to talk to a company's CEO without using the (European) rules for pronominal position - this is not perceived as a deviation from the normal. If you use the European syntax, you will sound weird and pedantic . One cannot ignore the different word order (as with the pronouns). One cannot ignore the different use of gerunds. One cannot ignore the different prepositions used. Such radical differences do not happen in Spanish or in English! Syntax differences are a hard proof of linguistic evolution - they evolve over a much longer time scale than vocabulary and are not easily borrowed from other languages. They serve as a good indicator of major differences. Now, if you add those syntax differences to all the other differences listed above (pronunciation, vocabulary, culture, spelling) you will have either 1) two very different forms of the same language 2) two different languages. Considering how reluctant the Portuguese-speaking countries were in uniting (even partially) their spellings (in which the differences are merely cosmetic and minor), I don't think it is fair to consider that the Portuguese-speaking countries are truly united by a language. Some facts for considering: * Today I installed a new program in my computer. Somehow, it detected I use Portuguese, and it automatically switched to Portuguese - but to the European variety. I could not use that program, since most of the new words related to science and technology are different in those languages. And I don't mean in informatics only, where the differences are already notorious. Brazilians say AIDS, the Portuguese say SIDA. Brazilian uses fotons, the Portuguese use fotoes. I had to switch the program to English to understand how to use it. * When Saramago, a Portuguese author, died, I watched to an old interview of his on TV. The TV broadcast the interview with subtitles, just as they would do with a interview conducted in a foreign language, even though we supposedly speak the same language. So I'm not the only one complaining about the differences! * The U.S. and England have a long history of political interactions (WWI, WWII, Thatcher-Reagan, Iraq). Brazil and Portugal have not interacted much since Independence. * "Harry Potter" movies make a enormous success in the U.S. "Sherlock Holmes" also seems to be successful. And so can Hollywood movies be enjoyed in England. The Beatles and Madonna crossed the Atlantic. This type of cultural interaction does not occur between Brazil and Portugal. *When those cultural interactions cross the Atlantic they get "translated". Notorious exception goes to Saramago's books in Brazil - but this is because that Portuguese author forbid the Brazilian publishing companies from "translating" his work. * The agreement to unify the spellings of all forms of Portuguese took around 20 years to take off. When it did take off, it was so modified in order to please the stubborn grammarians from both varieties that it ended up accomplishing little - some accents, diacritics and hyphens got dropped. If you think such changes accomplish the so desired unification, you'd better think again. Even some original proponents of the unification were disappointed, because Brazil and Portugal cannot agree to follow the same rules. Those are enough differences. I'm afraid sometimes I sound like I wanted those languages to be different - I don't. I am sure we all would profit from speaking and using the same language. But I don't see that happening. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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