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Portuguese sometimes has a strangely literary cadence and the sentence structure tends to formality. It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic,
by TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Portuguese sometimes has a strangely literary cadence and the sentence structure tends to formality.
It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic, and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken. There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native speakers of both languages.
That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia when they meant lado or maybe bordo.
- reubenmorais 5y agoUsually the words that are close to Latin or Greek in Portuguese will have English equivalents (<- here's one!) that are also close to the Latin/Greek. So in a pinch for a word and trying to translate in your head, it's easier to remember the words with a smaller transformation from Portuguese to English than something very different. Some sort of compression coding of a translation dictionary inside of the brain :D
- gverrilla 5y agoin Brazil the outskirts or suburbs of a city are called "periferia", and it might be that the person didn't know the english words for "lado" or "borda" so he used a close relative which is "periferia", sounds very plausible to me. nothing to do with fancy words, because "periferia" definetly ain't fancy (in pt)
- orthoxerox 5y ago> which sounds like Russian when spoken Or rather Polish. Both Polish and Portuguese have nasals and sibilants in abundance.