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by Agenor Soares dos Santos

English words in PortugueseA few weeks ago a friend of mine downloaded a letter, apparently fanciful but in fact seriousand with a tinge of helplessness: its writer was making a joke about the adoption of Americanwords by the Argentines, his countrymen. It might have originated in Brazil, and I was rathersurprised to learn that their general attitude toward loanwords is similar to ours. However, whilemany words they use are long familiar with us, others are not to be found in our currentlanguage : a ssistant (= secretária), boss, burger (Brazil, hambúrguer), compact (Brazilian CD –following our usual way of borrowing the English abbreviation: AIDS, FBI, VHF, UNICEF, andothers), entrepreneur, interview, mark up, meeting (not a substitute for “reunião” - a discardedAnglicism as “comício”), pin (= our button, often misspelled botton, in poli tical campaigns),roast-beef, steak , wording, etc.

So, we are not alone in our remarkable openness vis-à-vis English, but in all our cases –including the different situation of French - what should first of all be emphasized as regardsthe so-called loanwords (not considering syntactic loans, a much neglected threat to the

language whose danger to Portuguese Benedetti emphasized in a wise and perceptive paper,but perhaps overstating her case) is that their direction and acceptance has always dependedon extralinguistic conditions – political power, economic supremacy and the reach of the culturalinfluence of a people. The hegemony of the United States, surging especially from the end of World War II, and the extent of its multifarious contacts in the world, something neverwitnessed in history, is sufficient explanation for the strength of the English langua ge – and a ddto this its widely recognized superiority as a quasi ideal lingua franca. In our particular case,shunning outright any new loanword is pointless since, quipped Machado, recalling the attitudeof Castro Lopes against Gallicisms, “decrying borrowings is like building on sand.” A fairappraisal in the future – linguistic and cultural – will show the advantages of this influx because ,in the words of Christophe Nyrop, “crucial chapters of the history of the cultural development of a people can be written if one only considers the foreign words to which citizenship rights havebeen granted.” 

The difference between foreign words/phrases (estrangeirismos) and loanwords (empréstimos)is more clear-cut in our vocabulary than in English, which, according to Jespersen, has “a muchgreater propensity to swallowing foreign words raw.” The former are basically words of difficult or

impossible assimilation and keep their foreign form because their phonemes, morphologicalstructure, or spelling do not conform to those of the receptor language, whereas loanwords havebeen, with less or no structural difficulty, incorporated in such a way that in many cases theirorigin is no longer perceived. Some authors, like Bechara, dismiss this distinction, maintainingthat, in Portuguese, “`empréstimo´ covers the two notions and applies both to lexical andsyntactic and semantic `estrangeirismos’.” However, for practical purposes we will keep to it, inorder to highlight two types of traits (out of so many that would require a full essay) of words wehave bo rrowed from what Bloomfield name d the “uppe r language”:

a) The mention of burger points to our peculiar trend of morphological and spelling adaptationof foreign words seen in aeróbica, bangalô, copidesque, coquetel, destróier, esporte, faroeste,flerte, iate, jângal, lanche, líder, nocaute, quitinete, soçaite, sué ter, and ma ny others - a coursethat leads spelling reformers in authority to propose bizarre formations likecopirraite or e snobe(and probably the latest creation, guêi – seemingly an attemp t at affirmative nationalism,considering that gay is now practically a universal term); and others that look so clumsy, oreven weird, that not all of them have a chance of catching on: andebol/handebol, eslaide,eslaque, eslógão (= slogan!), espiche, esplim, estafe, leiaute, queque, etc.

b) Semantic borrowings - “translation-loans”, i.e., “indirect borrowings or words modeled moreor less closely on foreign ones, though consisting of native speech-material” (Jespersen)-,calque or loanshift (Haugen), in Portuguese empréstimo semântico, decalque, calque or, lesscommon, calco (Bechara). They are cognates that pass unnoticed by many translators:accurate, appeal, bargain, basically, casual, consistent, control, curiously, decidedly, disorder,effective, exposure, face value, graphic, imperative, industry, lavatory, materialize, out of thequestion, pacemaker, penalize, qualification, reconcile, requirement, scenario, sophisticated,table tennis, technicality, used to. A comprehensive inventory of o ver 200 o f such calques withthe differences in meaning will be a chapter in my dictionary due out shortly.REFERENCES: Benedetti, Ivone Cas tilho, “O T radutor e o Po rtuguês”. Tradução e Comunicação –Revista Brasileira de Tradutores, São Paulo: maio 2000, p. 43-44; Mata Machado Filho, Airesda, “Em Busca do Termo Próprio”. Grande Coleção da Língua Portuguesa, São Paulo: Gráfica-Urupês-Edinal, s/d, c. 1950, 5° vol. p. 1907. ; Nyrop, Christophe, in Cunha, Celso, “LínguaPortuguesa e Realidade Brasileira”, 6ª edição atualizada, Rio: Editora Tempo Brasileiro, 1976,p.106; Bechara, Evanildo, “Moderna Gramática Portuguesa”, 37ª edição, revista e ampliada,Rio: Editora Lucerna, 2000: 599 and 351; Bloomfield, Leonard, Language, New York: Holt,Rinehart and Winston: 1965/1933; Jespersen, Otto, Language, Its Nature, Development and

Origin, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949/1922: p. 215.[The translation of Portuguese andFrench texts is m ine]

The authorAgenor Soares dos Santos is a retired diplom at and a former teacher of English and CollegeProfesso r in his na tive town, Belo Horizonte. He is the au thor of the well-known “Guia P rático de

 

PublisherRenato Guazzelli

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This issue had thecollaboration of 

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Santos

Julio MenochelliAlfredo González

HermosoJack Scholes

Ian NewbyFrancisco Gom es de

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Tradução Inglesa – Comparação semântica e estilística entre os cognatos de sentido diferenteem inglês e português.” The book he announces in this article is designed to go well beyondthe scope of the fo rmer as an advanced d ictionary and guide fo r translators from English.e-ma il: agenors@portoweb.com.br