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The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)

150 points by olvy0 5y ago

weinzierl 5y ago
When I was in Brazil in the 90s someone asked me if I liked 'nuns and hoses'. Took me a while to figure out she meant Guns 'N Roses. The Brazilian R is very variable as the article points out but often it is closer to an H than to an R and sometimes this is even true when Brazilians speak English;-)
- emblaegh 5y ago
  I heard a story of an English speaker being confused when a Brazilian asked them if they liked “hedge hotch”, the endearing way Brazilian fans refer to the band red hot chilli peppers.
kentosi 5y ago
As an English speaker who learnt Portugal Portuguese (PT-PT), which has its own "r" pronunciations, imagine my surprise and confusion when I heard Brazilian Portuguese (BR-PT) for the first time :-)
ncmncm 5y ago
These treatments always skip over the elephant in the room: "r" where there is none. E.g. Brit pronunciation "agender" for agenda, and most problematically "drawring". It appears that appending "r" sounds was once a marker for "posh" status in England, and adopted by the middle class as an attempt at upward mobility. But they went overboard, and added Rs the posh wouldn't. Arguably, it was initially done in mockery, but the mocked missed the joke. I don't know any way to test that hypothesis.
imbnwa 5y ago
You'd be surprised how much Brazillian Portuguese phonology you can learn from watching MMA where Brazilians have had a big impact since the outset.
ORioN63 5y ago
Link is dead. As an anecdote, to kick off discussion, I, as a native European Portuguese speaker, that was born in France (moved to Portugal when I was 4), can _barely_ pronounce them correctly. Not all R's have the same roll of the tongue. They're usually in the middle of the word. Hate those R's.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Don't worry, as native European Portuguese speaker, the way we speak the H means (hint for others, we really don't), has already landed me in some funny situations in languages where it actually makes a difference, like German.
  - ptsneves 5y ago
    The difference between the sounds of "a penis" and "happiness" is mostly the h vocalization which European Portuguese basically ignores.
kubb 5y ago
Just look up the pronunciation in a dictionary.
meepmorp 5y ago
tl;dr - /r/ in Portuguese apparently has a wide variety of allophones
bradrn 5y ago
This is an excellent article! However, I find the definition of phonemes very unsatisfying: > Phonemes are not exactly the same thing as sounds, and they’re not exactly the same thing as letters. They are kind of like connecting categories that map letters to sounds … Phonemes are a way of saying, If you see a letter “r” is this situation, use Sound A for it. If you see “r” in this other situation, use a different Sound B for it. But Sound A and B are not fixed — they will vary depending on the specific dialect. The problem is that this relies on letters, which is a problem because (a) many languages are unwritten, and (b) many other languages have weird irregular orthographies (e.g. English, French, Irish and Tibetan). Instead, in linguistics, the standard definition is that two sounds are different phonemes if they can be the only thing differentiating two words. For instance, in English, /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes, because we have pairs of words like pat and bat, which differ only in that one has /p/ and the other has /b/. By contrast, Mandarin has no such word pairs… but it does have the distinction between /p/ and /pʰ/ (where the latter has an extra puff of air, or ‘aspiration’), in words like /pa²/ ‘fall’ and /pʰa²/ ‘crawl’. But [p] and [pʰ] are not distinguished in English — we have a single phoneme /p/ which can be pronounced in either way, with no difference whatsoever. (Of course, this definition can sometimes get difficult to apply. For instance, English has no minimal pairs between /h/ and /ŋ/ [the sound ending words like ‘sing’], because the one only occurs at the beginning of a syllable, and the other occurs only at the end. But by and large it works satisfactorily.)
- tombh 5y ago
  You got me thinking about minimal pairs of /p/ and /pʰ/ in English (at least my British English anyway). I'm not a linguist, but is this not a minimal pair? Mice pour (water into a jug) My spore (as opposed to your spore) Or can minimal pairs not cross word boundaries?
  - bradrn 5y ago
    Interesting question! Not a linguist, but I’d be inclined to the view that the word boundary itself is phonemic: these can be transcribed (for me) as /ma͡is poː/ vs /ma͡i spoː/. Supporting this analysis is the fact that the [p] vs [pʰ] distinction then can be derived using the same phonological rules as usual; also, for me, the /a͡i/ in /ma͡is/ is slightly shorter than that in /ma͡i/. But, as I said, exactly pinning down the phonemes of a language can be tricky.
coliveira 5y ago
The letter R in Portuguese can range from a strong sound to voiceless. It all depends on where the r appears in the word, the context in the phrase, and the dialect used.
pjmlp 5y ago
Very interesting article, however from Portuguese point of view, it left out plenty of dialects, not only it is somehow diverse across the mainland and islands, the african versions are also not one per country rather it also varies per region and the local criolo influences. However the author does acknowledge that his knowledge is focused on Brasil, so there is that.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Yes. I've personally heard people from Cabo Verde and the way people from Brazil, Portugal and Cabo Verde speak is clearly different.
marcodiego 5y ago
Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk about popular artists and TV, there are some which are popular in the whole country. This makes the people well aware of how people from different parts of the country speak and, naturally, people have developed a "common way to speak" that can sound "neutral" to most people. I've heard people calling this way to speak "fala de apresentador da Globo": which means "Globo's presenter way of speech"; Globo is Brazil's most popular TV network and its presenters have a clear way to speak that sounds very neutral and free from accents from one region or another. I lived in Rondônia during the 90's. It was a very recent state and, at the time, people from all over the country went to live there to make good use of the new opportunities offered by a recent new state. So, the people living there were mostly from other places and there was a mix of accents which made it basically accent-free. All forms of pronouncing "r" are very easy to me. And, to help people understand what I say and because I lived among very different accents, I speak in a very "neutral" way. People have once said I have a "fala de apresentador da Globo". But this way of speech is not uncommon in most developed regions neither among people who have to talk to people of different parts of the country. Result of this: Brazilians can speak most of the romance languages and even other less phoneme rich languages from Asia or Europe without much difficulty. We even make fun of hispanophonic latin-americans because they can't say "cair no poço não posso".
- pelasaco 5y ago
  Normally Brazilians have issues with the german R as spoken in the North of Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU6ZLaZ7Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU6ZLaZ7Z8
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Indeed, this 'r' sound where the vibration lies deep into the throat is not part of our phoneme repository. I have no difficulty with it though.
  - jventura 5y ago
    It’s just a regular “r” for us pt-pt natives... :)
forinti 5y ago
I'm a native Portuguese and Spanish speaker. The phonetics of Portuguese are much richer than Spanish, even though they are so similar in vocabulary. I think this is the reason you can speak Spanish so much faster (even if you are fluent in both). But I think the most difficult r is the Spanish r in perro. I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho. Personal anecdote: once my mother (who speaks Spanish first) asked for me to dry the table with a sponge: Pega uma esponja e seca. Now, Spanish only has one e, but in Portuguese "seca" with an open e is "to dry" - the verb - and with a closed e is the adjective "dry". So I handed her a sponge and was duly reprimanded.
- ravishi 5y ago
  As a Brazilian learning Spanish, I definitely have a hard time saying perro. Perrito is way more difficult.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  >I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho. Do Argentines do this too or is that with just ll?
  - ralgozino 5y ago
    It depends on what part of Argentina, Buenos Aires and Rioplatense accent use a strong rolled R, meanwhile in Cuyo region (center-western: Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis and La Rioja) it's pretty common a very different sound for the R, that's closer to an English 'sh' sound. I believe it is being lost though and younger people use the rolled R but not as strong as in Buenos Aires. There a lot more differences with the Rioplatense accent, like with the Y and LL. Accent from Mendoza and San Juan are much closer to Chile's than to Buenos Aires accent.
pelasaco 5y ago
"Take this with a grain of salt, because I am not as familiar with the European dialect." Actually as expected in Portugal, they have many dialects too. There are four main Portuguese dialect groups, all mutually intelligible: Central, or Beira, Southern (Estremenho), including Lisbon, Alentejo, and Algarve, Insular, including the dialects of Madeira and the Azores. There is even an extinct one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Portuguese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Portuguese. The Portuguese version of this wiki article has more information https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeu-portugu%C3%AAs https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeu-portugu%C3%AAs
- nwatson 5y ago
  I can't imagine any two English accents as far apart from each other as are the Portuguese accents of "standard Globo TV presenter in Brazil" and that of the Azores. I grew up on and off in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Brasília) and later spent 20+ years in the SF Bay Area. Once in a while I'd run into old-school Azoreans who'd lived in the Portuguese towns (Santa Clara, Newark, San Leandro, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, Castro Valley) for a few generations and it was almost impossible to understand them until I started listening occasionally to the Bay Area Portuguese radio station. I'd mimic those accents and got a bit better at understanding those folks, but with cost/benefit ... Brazilians have said I now sound Portuguese, and Portuguese people say they can understand my Portuguese better than a normal Brazilian's. I'm not sure how it's changed in the last decade, but in many SF Bay Area and Central Valley towns there are Portuguese "Sociedade do Espirito Santo" (Holy Spirit Society) halls and Catholic churches where Portuguese/Azoreans maintain their traditional festivals and music. I think Neto's shut down its huge Santa Clara restaurant/market and reincarnated in a strip-mall/sausage-making operation, but at least a couple years ago you could still go and get an excellent Linguiça sandwich. EDIT: Sociedade Espirito Santo, Neto's
  - arcticfox 5y ago
    Is this a reasonable example of the Azores Portuguese?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVHjELjR9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVHjELjR9s Sounds like a Russian speaking Portuguese to me (American fluent in Brazilian Portuguese), pretty amusing but I can follow everything. I often think that when I hear PT-PT as well - interestingly someone in the comments says this sounds less Russian to them. I have very little exposure to non-Brazilian accents so no idea in general, but the difference sounds about as much as American English<->Scottish English to my ears. I wonder if there's a way to measure the distance between accents? That would be really interesting. I'd be curious how close all the American accents are to each other, versus the British accents, etc. and then also in comparison to Portuguese accents and other languages.
diego_moita 5y ago
Scottish people can pronounce the same sound! When you say "Loch Ness" with a very thick Scottish accent, the "ch" in loch is quite close to it. Also the sound is quite common in other languages: "roi" in French, "reisen" in German, ... Even some Spanish dialects like Galego have the same r. Only Castilian/normal Spanish doesn't have it. OTOH, just ask a Brazilian to pronounce simply "the". The "th" phoneme is quite hard for Portuguese speakers. Better yet, ask a native from Rio to pronounce any word with a mute "t" or "d". It's hilarious. "Brad Pit" becomes "brahdjee peetchee".
- pelasaco 5y ago
  Hot-Dog: Rotchi-Dogee Hardcore: Rardjee-Core Armlock: Army-locky
  - simtel20 5y ago
    Screen capture: prin-tche
  - weinzierl 5y ago
    Facebook = Fassy-Bookee
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    Hobby: Rhobby
- lvass 5y ago
  >"Brad Pit" becomes "brahdjee pitchee" I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. It's a common pattern in a large amount of english words, I think most or all of us can pronounce it correctly, but we don't because it'd be harder say and recognize while trying to pronounce it like an american almost sounds like pedantry here.
  - lucis 5y ago
    > I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. You mean about the "mispronunciation"? Because the j in "bradhjee" I hear mostly in southeastern accents, where people in Northeast says it more closely with how it's spoken in English.
soneca 5y ago
My name is Rodrigo and I work remotely for an american company with only American teammates. When I say my name I pronounce the way Americans would pronounce it to simplify communication, but it always feels a little phony. Like I am making up a nickname that’s actually not mine to a new group. Not anything that bothers me, just a curiosity of global remote work and our R.
- digorithm 5y ago
  Hah! I'm also Rodrigo, and I've been living in Canada for 6 years now. I've given up hoping people would get the pronunciation of my name right. At this point I think I'm even more used to the North-American way. Rodrigo is a hella hard name if you've never spoken Portuguese.
- Kaze404 5y ago
  "Rod" might work as a suitable nickname, since it's also used for names like Roderick (which sounds eerily similar to Rodrigo now that I think about it).
  - soneca 5y ago
    No one calls me Rod, I am not comfortable creating an actual nickname. I am happy enough just changing the pronunciation
    - kergonath 5y ago
      My approach as well. I’m not bothered with different people pronouncing my name differently. Does not stop me from being pedantic about pronouncing other people’s “correctly” :)
    - Kaze404 5y ago
      You don't necessarily have to frame it that way. "Hey folks, I understand my name can be difficult to pronounce sometimes so feel free to call me X". But I also totally understand if you don't feel like it's necessary. Just something to keep in mind :)
- 5y ago
wefarrell 5y ago
I can never get over the way my Brazilian wife pronounces the currency. Singular - hey-ow Plural - hey-I. They're spelled real and reals respectively.
- zanellato19 5y ago
  real and reais, not reals. hey-I on the plural doesn't make a lot of sense to me, you are probably not hearing something she is saying.
  - wefarrell 5y ago
    You're right there is a very subtle s as the end that I wasn't noticing, especially at the speed of normal conversation.
- samueloph 5y ago
  The correct spelling for the plural form is 'reais' (the 'l' from the singular form 'real' becomes an 'i'). I think I've never heard anybody pronounce 'reais' without the sound of s at the end, are you sure she doesn't say it? It's probably something like hey-eyes (hey-eye-shh for cariocas)
  - cesarb 5y ago
    A small historical note: there are/were two different Brazilian currencies called Real. The current one has "reais" as the plural, but the old one had "réis" as its plural form.
paol 5y ago
Just a heads up for non-portuguese speakers: brazilian portuguese and european portuguese can differ quite extremely in pronunciation. Then there's also african portuguese pronunciations, though to my ear those tend to be closer to the european. The article is written from a brazilian standpoint, so keep that in mind when comparing with your own experiences of the language.
- lucis 5y ago
  That's right, this is for Portuguese, not Portuguese (PT) /s Recently, there was a polemic in social media that Portuguese mothers were worried their kids were only speaking "Brazilian", due to the dominance of Brazilian content creators in Youtube, Instagram, TikTok... [1]: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-jornal-portugues-denuncia-que-criancas-do-pais-so-falam-brasileiro.html https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-... (Portuguese)
  - samueloph 5y ago
    Yes, it's funny in a way that Brazilian culture is influencing Portuguese's other than the reverse (since Portugal colonized Brazil). I guess during the internet era, having a bigger population is a big factor on "culture pressure" or whatnot (there's more Brazilian online content than Portuguese, or any other lusophone country).
    - simtel20 5y ago
      It seems very similar to the US influence on other English speaking cultures: the African diaspora influence on all aspects of culture in both countries - language, sport (the case has been made that boxing, basketball soccer/football and more are all directly influenced by asthetic stylings of African origin), music (blues, rock, samba, forro, hip-hop, soul, funk both the Brazilian and American types) literature (the places and people written about by Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, ToninMorriaon) etc. and in my experience the ruling castes of both countries have sort of devauled or ignored the absolute saturation of these cultural influences over generations even as they have become the foundation which popular culture is built on and exported from both countries.
StephenSmith 5y ago
I took some Spanish in school but my most notable experience attempting to learn (Brazilian) Portuguese as a native English speaker was hearing the difference between the names José and Roberto. There's the quintessentially, native-English-speaking pronunciation of José with a hard J. With Spanish, the J is obviously silent, or extremely soft, but in Brazilian Portuguese (I can't speak for other forms), you pronounce it almost like someone reading the name for the first time in English, with the hard J. And then you have the opposite with the name Roberto, in Spanish the R is hard and present (and easy for native-English-speakers), but in Portuguese, the R has that same soft J sound that Spanish speakers use on José. It's fun how these (three) languages intertwine.
- Rygian 5y ago
  As a Spaniard, I am confused by the "the J is obviously silent". The most neutral pronunciation of José in Spain (the one you would hear in Spanish broadcast news) is indeed /xo'se/. Spanish is extremely rich in pronunciation variations, due to the large population spread over several continents, so in most cases when you observe something about "Spanish" you need to focus on a specific region or dialect, for the observation to have a proper context.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    It's also /xo'se/ in Mexico as far as I can tell. I'm not Mexican but I know a lot of Mexicans and am pretty sure that's how they'd pronounce it. I would be very surprised if the "Spanish J" is silent anywhere; the person you're replying to almost certainly just made a mistake.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      From my experience, native English speakers have a very hard time pronouncing the Spanish /j/ (or the German /ch/, for that matter, or even the French /r/), so they just pronounce it as a somewhat stressed /h/ (for lack of a better term).
      - 5y ago
jayroh 5y ago
As a BR-born son of an American and a Brazilian, this post/article brings me all sorts of joy. To this day, the sound of people speaking in BR-PT out in public brings a smile to my face. (To be clear, I live in Boston so there is a pretty large Brazilian population here) All languages have their own beauty but there's something special about Brazilian Portuguese - the flow, the "sing-song'y" nature of it, it's almost like a dance. Admittedly I am biased, but I've heard similar from people without the background.
samueloph 5y ago
If you're interested in Portuguese in general, I suggest listening to Azorean Portuguese. It's so different it sounds like a different language to most Brazilians (and I assume to other nationalities as well), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7efyRaaTUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7efyRaaTUU
- throwaway599281 5y ago
  There are certain interviews to Azoreans that require subtitles to be added, otherwise nobody from the mainland will understand anything that they're saying due to a very thick accent. But as far as I know it's due to the colonization of the islands with both Portuguese people and people from the low countries.
CrociDB 5y ago
I, a native portuguese speaker, recently wrote about the German R pronunciation was one of the most complicated for me to grasp in this language. Even listening and identifying it is really hard for me. https://crocidb.com/post/on-the-german-r-pronunciation/ https://crocidb.com/post/on-the-german-r-pronunciation/
pantuza 5y ago
We pronounce 'r' in Portuguese as 'h' in english words. For example: the word 'mice' in Portuguese is 'rato' which we pronounce as if it was 'hato'. Similar to 'hat', 'hate' or 'hit'. But never as the english word 'rat'. For us it sounds like 'rrrrrrrat', because the 'r' is too long in the pronunciation. Summarizing: Portuguese don't use long 'r' phonemes when the word starts with 'r'. We usually pronounce as if the word starts with 'h' in english. The long 'r' is used when 'r' or 'rr' appears in the middle of the words.
- salicideblock 5y ago
  Actually, I am familiar with a rolling r such as in English 'rat', used in place of the the initial R or double RR, in rural central and northern Portugal. The linked article acknowledges this at the end
- throwaway599281 5y ago
  >Summarizing: Portuguese don't use long 'r' phonemes when the word starts with 'r'. We usually pronounce as if the word starts with 'h' in english. Either I didn't understand what you mean or I have never seen any Portuguese native speaker (including me) pronouncing it like you say we do.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kortex 5y ago
As a GAE native speaker quite comfortable with [ɹ] (inverted r), the voiced [post]alveolar approximant, I find this sound super fascinating. It's very rare in languages, suggesting it is very unusual phonetically, but it happens to be prominent in two of the most widely-spoken languages, so many speakers can pronounce it. I've always found alveolar trills more aesthetically pleasing, but you casually drop them in English conversation and you get weird looks and questions. Question for the peanut gallery: what the heck is the difference between the voiced alveolar approximant and the r-colored vowel, ɝ, (schwa plus hook)? They have different IPA so presumably they have distinct pronunciation, but I cannot hear a difference, nor can I feel a difference in my tongue placement when I say them. Also, curse HN's lack of unicode support. ~~I think it's related to MySql's stupid utf8 is actually utf8mb3 thing~~. I think they rendered? I see it in my comment after posting, but they are blank squares in the text form.
VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
As a Spanish speaker who has studied Portuguese, I love this. My first time in Portugal was a mess — I couldn’t understand anything. There were a few words I kept hearing people say that got me really mixed up: “Morrer” (to die) sounds a lot like “Mujer” (woman) in Spanish, whereas “Morar” (to live) sounds a lot like “Morir” (to die).
rogerallen 5y ago
LOL, I really expected to read an article about a variant of the statistics programming language R...
- tasha0663 5y ago
  I often entertain the notion that SQL would be way more enjoyable in Spanish. See also Fjölnir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_lang..., where the program usually seems to end with "GRUNNUR". My understanding is that this is basically just the name of a standard library package "ground", but screaming GRUNNUR at the end of a program feels like something out of an issue of Heavy Metal.
asveikau 5y ago
When the author is sampling R sounds of the world, two prominent omissions come to mind: - American English uses the r flap for the letters t and d between vowels. I think I may have also heard Australians do this? - I've heard Puerto Ricans when speaking Spanish do something close to what is described as a "Brazilian R". A /x/ type of sound where /r/ would be in other accents. Backed up here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_Spanish#Features https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_Spanish#Feature...
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  > American English uses the r flap for the letters t and d between vowels I think it's more constrained than this; I don't have it in "baton", for example. I'm no phonologist, but I suspect it has to be followed by a liquid (L or R sound). I have it in e.g. "butter" or "little".
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Repeating "butter" is actually a great way to teach people how to make the rolled R [r].
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      By "rolled r", do you mean the trill? The trill and flap are different sounds in some languages (for example, Spanish "perro" (dog) has the trill whereas "pero" (but) has the flap). The /t/ in Am.E. "butter" is the flap.
      - SamBam 5y ago
        I mean exactly the sound that is referred to as the "rolling R" or "[r]" in the original article. The flap is [ɾ]. In any case, as the sister comment says, the point is that in order to learn the rolling r (consciously, as an older person) you have to notice the flap, and repeated flapping can transfer into the rolled r. So, yes, you learn the flap first, but few people start out saying "I wish I could flap my rs," instead they're looking to learn how to roll them.
lhorie 5y ago
A discussion of Portuguese Rs wouldn't be complete without at least a mention of Jimmy Five[0] (aka Cebolinha), a character in the Monica's Gang cartoon. > Due to dyslalia, Jimmy Five is incapable of pronouncing the letter "r", replacing it with the letter l, in the Portuguese version, or with the letter w, in the English version. When the letter is used at the end of a word, however, he pronounces it normally (as in "car" or "locker"). What is fascinating about this cartoon is how diverse it is. I'd be hard pressed to name any other publication where one of the main characters has a speech impairment (which is often used to make jokes and puns), and that has side characters with various other disabilities, notably Hummer (Humberto), who's mute, and more recently Luca, a wheelchair-bound yet physically active boy. The cartoon isn't afraid of running stories about touchy topics like disability challenges, nor of using these topics for lighthearted comical effects. It also pretty much single-handedly exposed generations of Brazilians to Guarani indigenous culture (e.g. what Monica fan doesn't know what Tupã[1] is), and frequently publishes stories about ecology preservation and morality. IMHO, it's one of the best examples of minority representation in mainstream media done right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Five [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tup%C3%A3_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tup%C3%A3_(mythology)
- EL_Loco 5y ago
  Quirky anectode: I befriended an american hobo who travelled to Brazil in the 90's (he came here again every now and then). He didn't shower much, truly looked like a crusty vagabond, and when he found out about it, he absolutely loved the character named Capitão Feio ("Captain Ugly"), a dirty, crusty supervillain whose superpowers are spreading dirt around. Capitão Feio lives in the sewers and got his powers and he got crushed by all the dust and dirt of his huge, old comic book collection. He's also Cascão's uncle, and his goal is to become dirtier than his nephew. edit: I don't know what he's actually called in english. Captain Ugly is the literal translation. By the way, 'Little Onion' is way cooler than 'Jimmy Five'.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    > I don't know what he's actually called in english His english name is Captain Fray (a name that was presumably carefully chosen in order to avoid the need for redrawing his shirt, which has a big F on it)

150 points by olvy0 5y ago

When I was in Brazil in the 90s someone asked me if I liked 'nuns and hoses'. Took me a while to figure out she meant Guns 'N Roses. The Brazilian R is very variable as the article points out but often it is closer to an H than to an R and sometimes this is even true when Brazilians speak English;-)

emblaegh 5y ago
I heard a story of an English speaker being confused when a Brazilian asked them if they liked “hedge hotch”, the endearing way Brazilian fans refer to the band red hot chilli peppers.

kentosi 5y ago

As an English speaker who learnt Portugal Portuguese (PT-PT), which has its own "r" pronunciations, imagine my surprise and confusion when I heard Brazilian Portuguese (BR-PT) for the first time :-)

ncmncm 5y ago

These treatments always skip over the elephant in the room: "r" where there is none. E.g. Brit pronunciation "agender" for agenda, and most problematically "drawring". It appears that appending "r" sounds was once a marker for "posh" status in England, and adopted by the middle class as an attempt at upward mobility. But they went overboard, and added Rs the posh wouldn't. Arguably, it was initially done in mockery, but the mocked missed the joke. I don't know any way to test that hypothesis.

imbnwa 5y ago

You'd be surprised how much Brazillian Portuguese phonology you can learn from watching MMA where Brazilians have had a big impact since the outset.

ORioN63 5y ago

Link is dead. As an anecdote, to kick off discussion, I, as a native European Portuguese speaker, that was born in France (moved to Portugal when I was 4), can _barely_ pronounce them correctly. Not all R's have the same roll of the tongue. They're usually in the middle of the word. Hate those R's.

pjmlp 5y ago
Don't worry, as native European Portuguese speaker, the way we speak the H means (hint for others, we really don't), has already landed me in some funny situations in languages where it actually makes a difference, like German.
- ptsneves 5y ago
  The difference between the sounds of "a penis" and "happiness" is mostly the h vocalization which European Portuguese basically ignores.

kubb 5y ago

Just look up the pronunciation in a dictionary.

meepmorp 5y ago

tl;dr - /r/ in Portuguese apparently has a wide variety of allophones

bradrn 5y ago

This is an excellent article! However, I find the definition of phonemes very unsatisfying: > Phonemes are not exactly the same thing as sounds, and they’re not exactly the same thing as letters. They are kind of like connecting categories that map letters to sounds … Phonemes are a way of saying, If you see a letter “r” is this situation, use Sound A for it. If you see “r” in this other situation, use a different Sound B for it. But Sound A and B are not fixed — they will vary depending on the specific dialect. The problem is that this relies on letters, which is a problem because (a) many languages are unwritten, and (b) many other languages have weird irregular orthographies (e.g. English, French, Irish and Tibetan). Instead, in linguistics, the standard definition is that two sounds are different phonemes if they can be the only thing differentiating two words. For instance, in English, /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes, because we have pairs of words like pat and bat, which differ only in that one has /p/ and the other has /b/. By contrast, Mandarin has no such word pairs… but it does have the distinction between /p/ and /pʰ/ (where the latter has an extra puff of air, or ‘aspiration’), in words like /pa²/ ‘fall’ and /pʰa²/ ‘crawl’. But [p] and [pʰ] are not distinguished in English — we have a single phoneme /p/ which can be pronounced in either way, with no difference whatsoever. (Of course, this definition can sometimes get difficult to apply. For instance, English has no minimal pairs between /h/ and /ŋ/ [the sound ending words like ‘sing’], because the one only occurs at the beginning of a syllable, and the other occurs only at the end. But by and large it works satisfactorily.)

tombh 5y ago
You got me thinking about minimal pairs of /p/ and /pʰ/ in English (at least my British English anyway). I'm not a linguist, but is this not a minimal pair? Mice pour (water into a jug) My spore (as opposed to your spore) Or can minimal pairs not cross word boundaries?
- bradrn 5y ago
  Interesting question! Not a linguist, but I’d be inclined to the view that the word boundary itself is phonemic: these can be transcribed (for me) as /ma͡is poː/ vs /ma͡i spoː/. Supporting this analysis is the fact that the [p] vs [pʰ] distinction then can be derived using the same phonological rules as usual; also, for me, the /a͡i/ in /ma͡is/ is slightly shorter than that in /ma͡i/. But, as I said, exactly pinning down the phonemes of a language can be tricky.

coliveira 5y ago

The letter R in Portuguese can range from a strong sound to voiceless. It all depends on where the r appears in the word, the context in the phrase, and the dialect used.

pjmlp 5y ago

Very interesting article, however from Portuguese point of view, it left out plenty of dialects, not only it is somehow diverse across the mainland and islands, the african versions are also not one per country rather it also varies per region and the local criolo influences. However the author does acknowledge that his knowledge is focused on Brasil, so there is that.

marcodiego 5y ago
Yes. I've personally heard people from Cabo Verde and the way people from Brazil, Portugal and Cabo Verde speak is clearly different.

marcodiego 5y ago

Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk about popular artists and TV, there are some which are popular in the whole country. This makes the people well aware of how people from different parts of the country speak and, naturally, people have developed a "common way to speak" that can sound "neutral" to most people. I've heard people calling this way to speak "fala de apresentador da Globo": which means "Globo's presenter way of speech"; Globo is Brazil's most popular TV network and its presenters have a clear way to speak that sounds very neutral and free from accents from one region or another. I lived in Rondônia during the 90's. It was a very recent state and, at the time, people from all over the country went to live there to make good use of the new opportunities offered by a recent new state. So, the people living there were mostly from other places and there was a mix of accents which made it basically accent-free. All forms of pronouncing "r" are very easy to me. And, to help people understand what I say and because I lived among very different accents, I speak in a very "neutral" way. People have once said I have a "fala de apresentador da Globo". But this way of speech is not uncommon in most developed regions neither among people who have to talk to people of different parts of the country. Result of this: Brazilians can speak most of the romance languages and even other less phoneme rich languages from Asia or Europe without much difficulty. We even make fun of hispanophonic latin-americans because they can't say "cair no poço não posso".

pelasaco 5y ago
Normally Brazilians have issues with the german R as spoken in the North of Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU6ZLaZ7Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU6ZLaZ7Z8
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Indeed, this 'r' sound where the vibration lies deep into the throat is not part of our phoneme repository. I have no difficulty with it though.
- jventura 5y ago
  It’s just a regular “r” for us pt-pt natives... :)

forinti 5y ago

I'm a native Portuguese and Spanish speaker. The phonetics of Portuguese are much richer than Spanish, even though they are so similar in vocabulary. I think this is the reason you can speak Spanish so much faster (even if you are fluent in both). But I think the most difficult r is the Spanish r in perro. I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho. Personal anecdote: once my mother (who speaks Spanish first) asked for me to dry the table with a sponge: Pega uma esponja e seca. Now, Spanish only has one e, but in Portuguese "seca" with an open e is "to dry" - the verb - and with a closed e is the adjective "dry". So I handed her a sponge and was duly reprimanded.

ravishi 5y ago
As a Brazilian learning Spanish, I definitely have a hard time saying perro. Perrito is way more difficult.
selimthegrim 5y ago
>I like the way Chileans kind of sneak a zh in there: perzho. Do Argentines do this too or is that with just ll?
- ralgozino 5y ago
  It depends on what part of Argentina, Buenos Aires and Rioplatense accent use a strong rolled R, meanwhile in Cuyo region (center-western: Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis and La Rioja) it's pretty common a very different sound for the R, that's closer to an English 'sh' sound. I believe it is being lost though and younger people use the rolled R but not as strong as in Buenos Aires. There a lot more differences with the Rioplatense accent, like with the Y and LL. Accent from Mendoza and San Juan are much closer to Chile's than to Buenos Aires accent.

pelasaco 5y ago

"Take this with a grain of salt, because I am not as familiar with the European dialect." Actually as expected in Portugal, they have many dialects too. There are four main Portuguese dialect groups, all mutually intelligible: Central, or Beira, Southern (Estremenho), including Lisbon, Alentejo, and Algarve, Insular, including the dialects of Madeira and the Azores. There is even an extinct one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Portuguese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Portuguese. The Portuguese version of this wiki article has more information https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeu-portugu%C3%AAs https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeu-portugu%C3%AAs

nwatson 5y ago
I can't imagine any two English accents as far apart from each other as are the Portuguese accents of "standard Globo TV presenter in Brazil" and that of the Azores. I grew up on and off in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Brasília) and later spent 20+ years in the SF Bay Area. Once in a while I'd run into old-school Azoreans who'd lived in the Portuguese towns (Santa Clara, Newark, San Leandro, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, Castro Valley) for a few generations and it was almost impossible to understand them until I started listening occasionally to the Bay Area Portuguese radio station. I'd mimic those accents and got a bit better at understanding those folks, but with cost/benefit ... Brazilians have said I now sound Portuguese, and Portuguese people say they can understand my Portuguese better than a normal Brazilian's. I'm not sure how it's changed in the last decade, but in many SF Bay Area and Central Valley towns there are Portuguese "Sociedade do Espirito Santo" (Holy Spirit Society) halls and Catholic churches where Portuguese/Azoreans maintain their traditional festivals and music. I think Neto's shut down its huge Santa Clara restaurant/market and reincarnated in a strip-mall/sausage-making operation, but at least a couple years ago you could still go and get an excellent Linguiça sandwich. EDIT: Sociedade Espirito Santo, Neto's
- arcticfox 5y ago
  Is this a reasonable example of the Azores Portuguese?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVHjELjR9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVHjELjR9s Sounds like a Russian speaking Portuguese to me (American fluent in Brazilian Portuguese), pretty amusing but I can follow everything. I often think that when I hear PT-PT as well - interestingly someone in the comments says this sounds less Russian to them. I have very little exposure to non-Brazilian accents so no idea in general, but the difference sounds about as much as American English<->Scottish English to my ears. I wonder if there's a way to measure the distance between accents? That would be really interesting. I'd be curious how close all the American accents are to each other, versus the British accents, etc. and then also in comparison to Portuguese accents and other languages.

diego_moita 5y ago

Scottish people can pronounce the same sound! When you say "Loch Ness" with a very thick Scottish accent, the "ch" in loch is quite close to it. Also the sound is quite common in other languages: "roi" in French, "reisen" in German, ... Even some Spanish dialects like Galego have the same r. Only Castilian/normal Spanish doesn't have it. OTOH, just ask a Brazilian to pronounce simply "the". The "th" phoneme is quite hard for Portuguese speakers. Better yet, ask a native from Rio to pronounce any word with a mute "t" or "d". It's hilarious. "Brad Pit" becomes "brahdjee peetchee".

pelasaco 5y ago
Hot-Dog: Rotchi-Dogee Hardcore: Rardjee-Core Armlock: Army-locky
- simtel20 5y ago
  Screen capture: prin-tche
- weinzierl 5y ago
  Facebook = Fassy-Bookee
- aforwardslash 5y ago
  Hobby: Rhobby
lvass 5y ago
>"Brad Pit" becomes "brahdjee pitchee" I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. It's a common pattern in a large amount of english words, I think most or all of us can pronounce it correctly, but we don't because it'd be harder say and recognize while trying to pronounce it like an american almost sounds like pedantry here.
- lucis 5y ago
  > I think this is very much standard all over Brazil. You mean about the "mispronunciation"? Because the j in "bradhjee" I hear mostly in southeastern accents, where people in Northeast says it more closely with how it's spoken in English.

soneca 5y ago

My name is Rodrigo and I work remotely for an american company with only American teammates. When I say my name I pronounce the way Americans would pronounce it to simplify communication, but it always feels a little phony. Like I am making up a nickname that’s actually not mine to a new group. Not anything that bothers me, just a curiosity of global remote work and our R.

digorithm 5y ago
Hah! I'm also Rodrigo, and I've been living in Canada for 6 years now. I've given up hoping people would get the pronunciation of my name right. At this point I think I'm even more used to the North-American way. Rodrigo is a hella hard name if you've never spoken Portuguese.
Kaze404 5y ago
"Rod" might work as a suitable nickname, since it's also used for names like Roderick (which sounds eerily similar to Rodrigo now that I think about it).
- soneca 5y ago
  No one calls me Rod, I am not comfortable creating an actual nickname. I am happy enough just changing the pronunciation
  - kergonath 5y ago
    My approach as well. I’m not bothered with different people pronouncing my name differently. Does not stop me from being pedantic about pronouncing other people’s “correctly” :)
  - Kaze404 5y ago
    You don't necessarily have to frame it that way. "Hey folks, I understand my name can be difficult to pronounce sometimes so feel free to call me X". But I also totally understand if you don't feel like it's necessary. Just something to keep in mind :)
5y ago

wefarrell 5y ago

I can never get over the way my Brazilian wife pronounces the currency. Singular - hey-ow Plural - hey-I. They're spelled real and reals respectively.

zanellato19 5y ago
real and reais, not reals. hey-I on the plural doesn't make a lot of sense to me, you are probably not hearing something she is saying.
- wefarrell 5y ago
  You're right there is a very subtle s as the end that I wasn't noticing, especially at the speed of normal conversation.
samueloph 5y ago
The correct spelling for the plural form is 'reais' (the 'l' from the singular form 'real' becomes an 'i'). I think I've never heard anybody pronounce 'reais' without the sound of s at the end, are you sure she doesn't say it? It's probably something like hey-eyes (hey-eye-shh for cariocas)
- cesarb 5y ago
  A small historical note: there are/were two different Brazilian currencies called Real. The current one has "reais" as the plural, but the old one had "réis" as its plural form.

paol 5y ago

Just a heads up for non-portuguese speakers: brazilian portuguese and european portuguese can differ quite extremely in pronunciation. Then there's also african portuguese pronunciations, though to my ear those tend to be closer to the european. The article is written from a brazilian standpoint, so keep that in mind when comparing with your own experiences of the language.

lucis 5y ago
That's right, this is for Portuguese, not Portuguese (PT) /s Recently, there was a polemic in social media that Portuguese mothers were worried their kids were only speaking "Brazilian", due to the dominance of Brazilian content creators in Youtube, Instagram, TikTok... [1]: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-jornal-portugues-denuncia-que-criancas-do-pais-so-falam-brasileiro.html https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-... (Portuguese)
- samueloph 5y ago
  Yes, it's funny in a way that Brazilian culture is influencing Portuguese's other than the reverse (since Portugal colonized Brazil). I guess during the internet era, having a bigger population is a big factor on "culture pressure" or whatnot (there's more Brazilian online content than Portuguese, or any other lusophone country).
  - simtel20 5y ago
    It seems very similar to the US influence on other English speaking cultures: the African diaspora influence on all aspects of culture in both countries - language, sport (the case has been made that boxing, basketball soccer/football and more are all directly influenced by asthetic stylings of African origin), music (blues, rock, samba, forro, hip-hop, soul, funk both the Brazilian and American types) literature (the places and people written about by Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, ToninMorriaon) etc. and in my experience the ruling castes of both countries have sort of devauled or ignored the absolute saturation of these cultural influences over generations even as they have become the foundation which popular culture is built on and exported from both countries.

StephenSmith 5y ago

I took some Spanish in school but my most notable experience attempting to learn (Brazilian) Portuguese as a native English speaker was hearing the difference between the names José and Roberto. There's the quintessentially, native-English-speaking pronunciation of José with a hard J. With Spanish, the J is obviously silent, or extremely soft, but in Brazilian Portuguese (I can't speak for other forms), you pronounce it almost like someone reading the name for the first time in English, with the hard J. And then you have the opposite with the name Roberto, in Spanish the R is hard and present (and easy for native-English-speakers), but in Portuguese, the R has that same soft J sound that Spanish speakers use on José. It's fun how these (three) languages intertwine.

Rygian 5y ago
As a Spaniard, I am confused by the "the J is obviously silent". The most neutral pronunciation of José in Spain (the one you would hear in Spanish broadcast news) is indeed /xo'se/. Spanish is extremely rich in pronunciation variations, due to the large population spread over several continents, so in most cases when you observe something about "Spanish" you need to focus on a specific region or dialect, for the observation to have a proper context.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  It's also /xo'se/ in Mexico as far as I can tell. I'm not Mexican but I know a lot of Mexicans and am pretty sure that's how they'd pronounce it. I would be very surprised if the "Spanish J" is silent anywhere; the person you're replying to almost certainly just made a mistake.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    From my experience, native English speakers have a very hard time pronouncing the Spanish /j/ (or the German /ch/, for that matter, or even the French /r/), so they just pronounce it as a somewhat stressed /h/ (for lack of a better term).
    - 5y ago

jayroh 5y ago

As a BR-born son of an American and a Brazilian, this post/article brings me all sorts of joy. To this day, the sound of people speaking in BR-PT out in public brings a smile to my face. (To be clear, I live in Boston so there is a pretty large Brazilian population here) All languages have their own beauty but there's something special about Brazilian Portuguese - the flow, the "sing-song'y" nature of it, it's almost like a dance. Admittedly I am biased, but I've heard similar from people without the background.

samueloph 5y ago

If you're interested in Portuguese in general, I suggest listening to Azorean Portuguese. It's so different it sounds like a different language to most Brazilians (and I assume to other nationalities as well), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7efyRaaTUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7efyRaaTUU

throwaway599281 5y ago
There are certain interviews to Azoreans that require subtitles to be added, otherwise nobody from the mainland will understand anything that they're saying due to a very thick accent. But as far as I know it's due to the colonization of the islands with both Portuguese people and people from the low countries.

CrociDB 5y ago

I, a native portuguese speaker, recently wrote about the German R pronunciation was one of the most complicated for me to grasp in this language. Even listening and identifying it is really hard for me. https://crocidb.com/post/on-the-german-r-pronunciation/ https://crocidb.com/post/on-the-german-r-pronunciation/

pantuza 5y ago

We pronounce 'r' in Portuguese as 'h' in english words. For example: the word 'mice' in Portuguese is 'rato' which we pronounce as if it was 'hato'. Similar to 'hat', 'hate' or 'hit'. But never as the english word 'rat'. For us it sounds like 'rrrrrrrat', because the 'r' is too long in the pronunciation. Summarizing: Portuguese don't use long 'r' phonemes when the word starts with 'r'. We usually pronounce as if the word starts with 'h' in english. The long 'r' is used when 'r' or 'rr' appears in the middle of the words.

salicideblock 5y ago
Actually, I am familiar with a rolling r such as in English 'rat', used in place of the the initial R or double RR, in rural central and northern Portugal. The linked article acknowledges this at the end
throwaway599281 5y ago
>Summarizing: Portuguese don't use long 'r' phonemes when the word starts with 'r'. We usually pronounce as if the word starts with 'h' in english. Either I didn't understand what you mean or I have never seen any Portuguese native speaker (including me) pronouncing it like you say we do.

deleted 5y ago

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kortex 5y ago

As a GAE native speaker quite comfortable with [ɹ] (inverted r), the voiced [post]alveolar approximant, I find this sound super fascinating. It's very rare in languages, suggesting it is very unusual phonetically, but it happens to be prominent in two of the most widely-spoken languages, so many speakers can pronounce it. I've always found alveolar trills more aesthetically pleasing, but you casually drop them in English conversation and you get weird looks and questions. Question for the peanut gallery: what the heck is the difference between the voiced alveolar approximant and the r-colored vowel, ɝ, (schwa plus hook)? They have different IPA so presumably they have distinct pronunciation, but I cannot hear a difference, nor can I feel a difference in my tongue placement when I say them. Also, curse HN's lack of unicode support. ~~I think it's related to MySql's stupid utf8 is actually utf8mb3 thing~~. I think they rendered? I see it in my comment after posting, but they are blank squares in the text form.

VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago

As a Spanish speaker who has studied Portuguese, I love this. My first time in Portugal was a mess — I couldn’t understand anything. There were a few words I kept hearing people say that got me really mixed up: “Morrer” (to die) sounds a lot like “Mujer” (woman) in Spanish, whereas “Morar” (to live) sounds a lot like “Morir” (to die).

rogerallen 5y ago

LOL, I really expected to read an article about a variant of the statistics programming language R...

tasha0663 5y ago
I often entertain the notion that SQL would be way more enjoyable in Spanish. See also Fjölnir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_lang..., where the program usually seems to end with "GRUNNUR". My understanding is that this is basically just the name of a standard library package "ground", but screaming GRUNNUR at the end of a program feels like something out of an issue of Heavy Metal.

asveikau 5y ago

When the author is sampling R sounds of the world, two prominent omissions come to mind: - American English uses the r flap for the letters t and d between vowels. I think I may have also heard Australians do this? - I've heard Puerto Ricans when speaking Spanish do something close to what is described as a "Brazilian R". A /x/ type of sound where /r/ would be in other accents. Backed up here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_Spanish#Features https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_Spanish#Feature...

School-Cotton 5y ago
> American English uses the r flap for the letters t and d between vowels I think it's more constrained than this; I don't have it in "baton", for example. I'm no phonologist, but I suspect it has to be followed by a liquid (L or R sound). I have it in e.g. "butter" or "little".
- SamBam 5y ago
  Repeating "butter" is actually a great way to teach people how to make the rolled R [r].
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    By "rolled r", do you mean the trill? The trill and flap are different sounds in some languages (for example, Spanish "perro" (dog) has the trill whereas "pero" (but) has the flap). The /t/ in Am.E. "butter" is the flap.
    - SamBam 5y ago
      I mean exactly the sound that is referred to as the "rolling R" or "[r]" in the original article. The flap is [ɾ]. In any case, as the sister comment says, the point is that in order to learn the rolling r (consciously, as an older person) you have to notice the flap, and repeated flapping can transfer into the rolled r. So, yes, you learn the flap first, but few people start out saying "I wish I could flap my rs," instead they're looking to learn how to roll them.

lhorie 5y ago

A discussion of Portuguese Rs wouldn't be complete without at least a mention of Jimmy Five[0] (aka Cebolinha), a character in the Monica's Gang cartoon. > Due to dyslalia, Jimmy Five is incapable of pronouncing the letter "r", replacing it with the letter l, in the Portuguese version, or with the letter w, in the English version. When the letter is used at the end of a word, however, he pronounces it normally (as in "car" or "locker"). What is fascinating about this cartoon is how diverse it is. I'd be hard pressed to name any other publication where one of the main characters has a speech impairment (which is often used to make jokes and puns), and that has side characters with various other disabilities, notably Hummer (Humberto), who's mute, and more recently Luca, a wheelchair-bound yet physically active boy. The cartoon isn't afraid of running stories about touchy topics like disability challenges, nor of using these topics for lighthearted comical effects. It also pretty much single-handedly exposed generations of Brazilians to Guarani indigenous culture (e.g. what Monica fan doesn't know what Tupã[1] is), and frequently publishes stories about ecology preservation and morality. IMHO, it's one of the best examples of minority representation in mainstream media done right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Five [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tup%C3%A3_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tup%C3%A3_(mythology)

EL_Loco 5y ago
Quirky anectode: I befriended an american hobo who travelled to Brazil in the 90's (he came here again every now and then). He didn't shower much, truly looked like a crusty vagabond, and when he found out about it, he absolutely loved the character named Capitão Feio ("Captain Ugly"), a dirty, crusty supervillain whose superpowers are spreading dirt around. Capitão Feio lives in the sewers and got his powers and he got crushed by all the dust and dirt of his huge, old comic book collection. He's also Cascão's uncle, and his goal is to become dirtier than his nephew. edit: I don't know what he's actually called in english. Captain Ugly is the literal translation. By the way, 'Little Onion' is way cooler than 'Jimmy Five'.
- lhorie 5y ago
  > I don't know what he's actually called in english His english name is Captain Fray (a name that was presumably carefully chosen in order to avoid the need for redrawing his shirt, which has a big F on it)