Adventures of a Gringa

Guest Post: Spanish vs. Portuguese

When I first heard from Tiago asking about guest posts, my first reaction was a pang of jealousy. Tiago, after all, spent some time bouncing around Brazil, and is now living in Cartagena, the heart of the Colombian Caribbean.

After I got his post, however, my reaction was quite another. I am honored to include here his wonderful text about the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, and the surprises and hilarious pitfalls of moving between the two languages. This is a must-read for language lovers and speakers of Spanish and/or Portuguese.

Spanish vs. Portuguese: What’s the Difference?

One of the most common questions I get as a Brazilian-American living in Colombia is “What is the difference between Spanish and Portuguese?” I get this question from Colombians, Brazilians and Americans alike, and I can often hear a bit of skepticism in their voice, skepticism of my insistence on spending 6 months living in Colombia to learn Spanish after nearly a year in Brazil.

Many people with some experience with these two languages hold that there are very few differences, and sometimes even go so far as to claim that they are more like different dialects of an underlying Iberian lingua franca than two completely separate tongues (they are, in fact, both in the language group called West Iberian).

This view has its merits, especially when you consider that what we know today as “Spain” is really more of a confederacy of various regions with their own distinct cultures and languages. What we call simply “Spanish” is really Castilian, the particular dialect of the Kingdom of Castile, which over several centuries was the driving force behind the expulsion of the Moors from the peninsula and the unification of the numerous Iberian kingdoms into the Spanish state. 

Seen from this point of view, tiny Portugal can seem like just another one of these mini-kingdoms that just happened to not join its neighbors, and its language the local dialect of just another regional outpost of Iberian civilization.

The reasoning behind underestimating the differences between the two languages isn’t limited to history. The modern listener upon first exposure will immediately notice the broad similarities and even sometimes identical words and phrases between them. 

Take the following sentences, where the first, bold line in each pair is in Spanish and the second is in Portuguese, taken from Gramática Esencial de Español by Manuel Seco by way of Wikipedia:

Love Affair

It began so innocently.

I had woken up after a nap, the day I got home to New York. I was still in a daze when my mom suggested I go, if I was up for it. I assented, and off I went, in a stupor. But when the doors opened and I set my eyes upon one of the most wonderful things you could ever see, it was love at first sight.

The Cleaning Syndrome

After discussing this with several gringas also dating Brazilians, I feel better knowing I am not alone.

Eli's mom enjoys coming over to our apartment to clean and cook, sometimes with an intentional plan and other times making an executive decision to do so upon arrival. Even though she doesn't in any way intend to offend me, it always seems they don't think we're doing a good enough job taking care of ourselves and that the troops must be called in to get the real job done...which in the end does bother me.

This weekend, there was a definite plan, one that was not asked or requested, but rather informed. I'm coming over to clean. Period. When I woke up on Saturday morning, she was vacuuming the living room, with Eli's sister on the couch reading, while Eli's dad played computer games until lunch. She also brought a window vapor cleaner thing and used up half of our cleaning supplies--even though we'd already cleaned most of the apartment a few days earlier. Eli and I helped, though I spent half the time running around putting stuff back into place that had been rearranged (I'm OCD like that).

That day was an exception to the rule, since we went out for lunch, but usually on days like that Eli's mom brings ingredients and makes rice, beans, some sort of meat, and juice and then leaves the leftovers in our fridge. She never seems to think either of us eat enough, and she sometimes seems offended if I don't take more than two servings. This part I mind less.

I've heard from others that this is not uncommon for family members (always women) to come over to clean and cook, whether it's just because or for an event. Family ties in Brazil are much different than in the States, and this includes taking certain liberties with relatives. In the US, going over to someone's house to clean without asking permission first is moderately offensive in the least, and I've learned the best way to deal with it is to bite my tongue and stay out of the way.

The Make-Up Incident

I hardly ever wear make-up, only when it's absolutely necessary. It's partially because I'm lazy, partially because I'm not very good at putting it on, and partially because in a tropical climate most of it melts off my face within the first hour that I put it on. But the other day, it was very important for me to put make-up on and I wanted it to be done well, so I decided to head to the mall.

In the US, at least in New York, you can walk into any department store or cosmetics store and the make-up artists will happily do your make-up for you, showing you how things look to try to get you to buy as many products as possible. They're normally extremely nice, sometimes even overly nice, since their main objective is to get you to buy stuff. They are usually assertive and decide what they think is best for your face and skin tone, but make sure to accommodate you at the same time. With this in mind, I assumed it would be the same in Rio.

So I headed to one of the cosmetics stores at the mall, which was completely empty. I told the one attendant that I'd like to have my make-up done. She called a girl, who emerged from the back room, who was all but pleased to have to deal with a client. She sighed deeply and asked, "What do you want me to do?" I explained I wanted her to try a little bit of everything. Resigned, she began assembling her brushes. Every step along the way, she asked me how I wanted her to do it, which product I preferred, and threw in a few tips along the way.

It wasn't until she began powdering my face that I noticed she'd missed part of my face. "Um...can you do the other half of my face, too?" I asked. "Well, I'm just doing this half for now for you to see the difference, like before and after," she said. So she stuck entirely to the right side of my face.

When she was finished my eyes, lips, and cheeks, she showed me the result in the mirror. "It looks great! Can you do the other half of my face now?" Then she got uncomfortable. "Yeah, well, um, we don't do that. We don't do make-up. We just test it for you."

With a big WTF flashing across my forehead, I realized she was not doing the other half of my face. Since my face looked a little Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, I asked her to take off the make-up. She looked perplexed. "You want me to take it...off?" "Well, yeah, you only did one side." I wasn't about to go out lopsided. She sighed deeply and took it all off, and in my desperation, I bought the cream powder she'd used, so I could go home and put it on myself. I left the store with the super-fancy shopping bag and a fresh dose of culture shock.

From the outside in: Part III

Though I'd been very aware of this before, I was again struck by how little Americans know about the rest of the world. It always seemed to me that most people were disinterested, but I've discovered that's not necessarily the case.

Part of the reason I love New York so much is because it's like the whole world shrunken down to a city. There are communities here from countries all over the world: in one day, I hear a Russian meat skewer vendor screaming at her husband, a French businesswoman quietly speaking on her cell phone waiting for an elevator, a group of Chilean tourists chattering away as they peer at their maps, and a Chinese grandma playing with her grandson on the subway. In New York, you can eat almost nearly every every type of food you can imagine, find books in Japanese and Korean, and see movies in Hebrew and German. You can feel like you've traveled the world without going anywhere.

But just because we have so many foreigners here doesn't mean that even worldly New Yorkers are genuinely interested in them. Some are, to be sure. But just because you eat Chinese food and go to see a French movie that got rave reviews in the New York Times doesn't make you an international citizen. What I believe is that at least in the case of New Yorkers, people are only interested in limited aspects of other cultures, ones that are hip, cool, or fun. It's better than nothing, but many New Yorkers see other cultures as a part of New York life--just another bar, another cafe, another book. It's still better than most of America, though.

On a similar note, something I've always noticed about the US is what a short historical memory we have. This differs enormously from other countries, where even young people are deeply aware of events that happened fifty years, a hundred years, even centuries ago. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but part of it, I think, is disinterest in the past and a strong interest in the here and now. Our culture is very much an instant gratification culture, one where we are most excited by the new, the innovative, and the cool, like the Iphone or the latest bestseller. I think there is a possibility that this is changing, due to the multiple shocks my generation has suffered--9/11, disastrous wars in the Middle East, the economic crisis. I think the historical event that most people of my generation remember is World War II, since our grandparents have drummed it into our heads and we learn a lot about it in high school. Yet more recent events, like the Korean and Vietnam wars, are often glossed over in school and we learn about them in bad movies and on monument tours in Washington. There's hope, I think, that my generation has the opportunity to maintain a stronger collective historic memory, so we stop repeating our mistakes, over and over again.

From the outside in: Part II

I've raved a lot about the movie Wall-e, a futuristic Pixar film about a robot living in a world inhabited by garbage instead of humans. But one of the scariest things about it was its vision of the humans, living aboard spaceships since Earth is uninhabitable.

They're obese, to the point of being like blobs, and float around on hover armchairs, eating all of their food in liquid form from a Slushee cup with a straw. They move around, but all they see is the screen in front of their face, playing games, watching TV and talking to friends via video messenger.

The thing is, I really think we've come a little close to that, and I myself am guilty. I notice that people walk everywhere with their cell phones plastered to their ears, Starbucks in hand, not really paying attention to their surroundings. People bring their laptops to cafes, only to talk to friends virtually. People fiddle with their Blackberries and Iphones on the subway, on the train, on the street, in line, in the park, in the elevator. And don't get me started on the obesity part.

It just seems to me that we've begun relying so much on technology that we've become practically blind to the world around us and personal, face to face relationships have changed, for the worse. Why talk to your co-worker across the room when you can email them?

The other thing that Wall-e touches on is how big businesses have basically come to control the world, and people have fallen hostage to a constant bombardment of ads and promotions, as well as getting everything they own from a monopoly.

It really does seem that big business has gotten completely out of control, more so than I've ever noticed while living here. I can't do anything without being flooded with ads--on the street, on the Internet, on the subway, even in the bathroom. It's unbelievably annoying.

But the other, creepier thing is the hold corporations seem to have on America. I'll talk a little about the health care system later this week, in which big business have a firm and iron grip, but it's not just that. Oil companies obviously have us all on a short leash at the moment, but many Americans don't seem to realize how corporations control our entire lives. I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has showed me that major agricultural corporations control what we eat and actually want us to eat more calories than we can process per day, due to a corn surplus. (We're walking corn chips, apparently, since so much of our food has a corn base).

In turn, this has made me think about all the other companies that benefit from Americans eating more than they can handle, and as a result, getting fat: diet pill companies, gyms, weight loss programs, therapists, health magazines, plastic surgeons...it's endless, really. There are the car companies, the realtors, the insurance companies, the investment banks, the regular banks, the credit card companies...what do we have that isn't controlled by big business?

Another thing that's brought me to this realization is the American economic crisis. So many Americans got loans and mortgages from companies that were looking for big, short-term profits for their own benefit, which has, in the long-term, screwed the consumers big time. Credit card companies target people who will rack up big bills, whether or not they can pay, since they charge ludicrous interest rates. As a result, millions of Americans have incredible amounts of debt, and only now have some big businesses begun to suffer because of it.

I'm hoping that by the time I return from Brazil next year, perhaps we will have stood up to big business and told them, in the words of the great Kathy Griffin, to suck it.

From the outside in: Part I

I'd never been out of the country for so long before this past year in Brazil, and being back has allowed me a clearer vision of the US. It's kind of like Google Earth: sometimes, if you zoom in too far, everything gets blurry, but once you zoom out a bit, everything coming into focus.

One of the things I've noticed is how militarized public security has come (at least in New York). After 9/11, it was scary but seemed like a logical reaction, but now, seven years later, it creeps me out. It seems like people have gotten used to it: dozens of uniformed cops at subway stations, National Guard soldiers in uniform with sniper rifles at Grand Central, and signs everywhere urging people "If you see something, say something." Instead of making me feel safe, it has just made me incredibly paranoid.

With all of the measures put into place after 9/11, like the Patriot Act and expanded powers for police and government authorities, I don't feel any safer. Though I know a lot of what goes on is behind the scenes, things we will never see or know, I can't help but feel insecure.

On the other hand, it also seems to me that the US government's reaction to 9/11 was much like the reaction of parents when their teenager sneaks out of the house and has something terrible happen to her. The parents ground her, barely let her out on her own, and never really trust her again. (not based on personal experience, thankfully) I feel that a lot of the government's policies about immigration, airport security, and surveillance have been over the top and too late. The worst has happened and we can't un-do it. And now, with these secretive new policies, the government feels more like Big Brother than a protector.

In short, post 9/11 security measures have made me feel a lot worse. Oddly, I feel much safer taking the Metro in Rio than I do the subway in New York. I can ride in peace without feeling completely paranoid.