words. “Boa Noite!” I exchanged an evening greeting with a handsome steward at the plane’s door. I would soon discover that very little English is spoken in Brazil, and my daughter and I are easily mistaken as Brazilians, thanks to our olive skin tone and naturally dark hair. I spent my week mesmerized and wide-eyed, taking in the São Paulo nightlife and drinking “agua de coconut” on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. I wanted to plunge into the Brazilian population, to revel in the daily living going on around me and not be seen as a foreigner.
here and a heap there, until they are all similar but distinct. Larissa is a language professional; she has traveled the world, is trained as a legal and medical interpreter and speaks Portuguese, French, English and German. She said Spanish and Portuguese are very similar, with the same grammatical structure. But as many of my classmates came to realize, the Romance languages have what she called “false friends.”
You see, Portuguese is the most magnificent part of Brazil. Particularly in Rio, where somehow life is simultaneously rabidly fast-paced and laid-back, and the conversations are lyrical, engaging and intimate. Larissa insists people from Rio have the “best accent,” one that emphasizes the “ch” sound (yes, she’s a Rio native). Portuguese is what’s called a “Romance language,” along with French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and many others that are lesser known. These languages all have Latin as their foundation and can be traced back to the Roman Empire. On our planet, more than 920 million people speak a Romance language as their mother tongue and 300 million people as a second language. It is said that if you speak one of these languages, the others are easier to master -- with the exception of French, which differs the most from its sister languages. The key is that they all started out the same, but as they spread throughout the world, each gained a blend of new influences, a spoonful
Arara Brazilian Bird
As an example, when Larissa’s daughter (now 7) was an infant, the family employed a sweet Spanish-speaking housekeeper named Guilhermina. Larissa was in a rush one day and tried in Spanish to ask Guilhermina to take her daughter from her. She used the root word “pegar,” in Portuguese “to take,” www.2njoymag.com
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