
How a Portuguese-To-English Phrasebook Became a Cult Comedy Sensation - benbreen
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-portuguese-to-english-phrasebook-became-a-cult-comedy-sensation
======
jventura
As a native (Portuguese) speaker I completely understand why something like
this may have appeared!

You must understand that we have such a small country and few foreigners
bother to learn our language, even when they come to visit us. As we are a
very nice bunch of people (we are, even our political revolution was made with
carnation flowers [quite similar to roses], not a single bullet was shot), and
we are very proud of having the oldest stable borders of all Europe (since
1180 or something like that), we are proud to be able to provide our visitors
with the best possible experience. Therefore, if you don't learn our language,
we must try to communicate with you in other ways! You see, we don't want
foreigners to make fools out of themselves. I'll give you an example: we cook
almost every part of the pork, even the pork's balls, so we don't want you to
eat "tubaros" (pork's "balls") without you knowing it. we also cook the
intestines (bucho), so we want you to be prepared for the experience (put some
lemon).

On a more serious note (although I'm speaking some truth above), if you only
know a very small subset of the english vocabulary, you have to be creative.
So you have to speak in English as you would do in Portuguese. Unfortunately
it doesn't help that the english language sometimes mixes the verb and the
predicate(?) (from our perspective, of course). An example:

\- João - John

\- é - is

\- tipo - guy

\- porreiro - nice

So "O João é um tipo porreiro" translates directly to "The John is a guy
nice". Then, when you translate "to the letter" local proverbs such as "Quem
tem língua vai a Roma", you start getting stupid things like "With a tongue
one go to Rome" which in fact means something like "He who as a tongue can go
to Rome" (meaning that anyone who can speak [has a tongue] can ask for
directions).

All in all, in the end we just don't want our visitors to eat something
they'll regret later!

~~~
mikeash
"He who has a tongue can go to Rome."

I love this. I'd like to update it for the modern age. "He who has a phone can
look up Rome."

~~~
Mz
_If you have a smartphone, you can get to Rome._

Though, it kind of removes the social element and replaces it with technical
skill. Not exactly a one for one correlation.

~~~
mikeash
But doesn't that just reflect the changes we see? People chat less and screw
with their phones more.

~~~
Mz
The world has changed in many dimensions. Very often, what we notice and
"agree" upon is merely the tip of the iceberg.

It could be argued that the degree to which we talk online via forums, social
media, email, etc means we actually chat more, not less. I wouldn't begin to
know how to come up with meaningful stats. For many people, "screwing with
their phone" very often involves chatting online.

But we also have incredible location related resources these days that didn't
exist until relatively recently. Thanks to the development of GIS and GPS, we
can go online and get exact coordinates.

But, also, traveling that far can involve booking flights, train tickets, etc.
That is an entirely different skill set. You can be terrible at conversing
with people but good at using online mapping resources and ticketing
resources.

Technology has multipled the ways we can skin this cat. But, having traveled
via local and commuter buses from San Diego county to the High Desert and done
part of the research online and part by talking with bus drivers while en
route, I don't think being good at asking directions is an obsolete skill. It
is a skill that you perhaps can get by without if you do not have it. But I
could probably still get to Rome if I needed to by talking with people along
the way, whether I had a phone or not. It's something I am decently talented
at, on a good day.

------
ryancnelson
Some of the funniest (Brasilian) Portuguese misunderstandings I've encountered
were due to differences in how some letters are pronounced.

A leading hard "R" is often pronounced like an American "H". An "OU" is
sometimes pronounced like an American "ooo".

Once, at a trade show in Sao Paulo, I witnessed an unfortunate network
technician trying to debug our _ROUTERS_ tell our (female) director of I.T. to
please accept this ethernet-crossover cable and "put it between your hooters".

fun times.

~~~
n72
Indeed, my girlfriend, a Brazilian, is teaching me Portuguese. I have real
trouble pronouncing the kind of implied "m" and the end of "pão", without
which, instead of meaning bread, turns out to mean penis/cock/dick. "Eu como
pão" is something I have to be very careful with.

~~~
aandrieiev
On a related note, most of speakers of East-European languages have hard time
with word pairs like "bitch"/"beech" and "shit"/"sheet". Number of
"spreadshits" heard at some meetings can't leave anybody cold =)

------
ggambetta
Interestingly, although I speak no Portuguese or French, I can sort of
understand some of the sayings, by mentally translating them back in a literal
way to Spanish.

For example _" Few few the bird make her nest"_ probably means _" Bit by bit a
bird builds a nest"_. _" A horse baared don't look him in the tooth"_ is
probably _" Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"_, via the Spanish version _"
A caballo regalado no se le miran los dientes"_.

I can probably make sense of half of them. The other half are hilariously
mangled beyond recognition :)

~~~
marcosdumay
I do speak Portuguese, and a bit of French. I still have no idea how "tooth"
become singular in that phrase.

~~~
icebraining
It's actually rather common, at least in certain areas:

[https://ciberduvidas.iscte-
iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/a-ca...](https://ciberduvidas.iscte-
iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/a-cavalo-dado-nao-se-olha-osao-dentes/31406)

[http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1994/7/09/brasil/21.html](http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1994/7/09/brasil/21.html)

------
zeveb
I actually feel sorry for poor Pedro Carolino — he obviously put a lot of work
into his little book (even if it was horribly misguided), and people have been
laughing at it for over a century!

~~~
nicolas_t
True but at least his work is not forgotten.

------
jimmytidey
They link through to the book itself, I am crying with laughter.
[http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-
is-...](http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-
spoke-1884/)

One of my favourites: under 'games' is listed 'carousal', word that I hope to
use daily from now on.

~~~
Aelinsaar
I started laughing hysterically at, "A deaf."

"Oh I say there Bart, is that a deaf I see? Why bless the fat of my leg!"

~~~
riffraff
until now, I would have thought this was correct english -_-.

~~~
evincarofautumn
It’s a common error among English learners, particularly when it comes to
nationalities. We would say “I am French” or “I am a French person”, but never
“I am a French”.

~~~
dghf
Made even more confusing that you can do it with some nationalities but not
others. So "a French" is out, but most nationalities ending "-an" are OK: an
American, a German, an Afghan, a Norwegian, a Russian, an Italian. Also
"-ese", though with something of an archaic air: a Chinese, a Maltese, a
Portugese. Also a Swiss, an Argentine, an Israeli, because why not?

And of course pretty much any adjective can be used as a plural noun with the
definite article: the French, the Dutch, the beautiful and the damned, the
quick and the dead, etc.

~~~
elros
What's more, some nationalities have specific nouns for them, but not all. A
Spanish person is a Spaniard, a Finnish person is a Finn, but a German person
isn't a Germ.

Then there are those that fell out of use. There are Englishmen, Irishmen,
Frenchmen, but never Chinamen!

------
walrus01
My hovercraft is full of eels:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao)

------
jgw
I really like:

    
    
      "A bad arrangement is better than a process."
    

I might surreptitiously slip that into the next coding style guide I come
across.

~~~
NEDM64
Translating back to Portuguese could be "alum mau arranjo é melhor que um
processo".

Which can be translated to "

~~~
schoen
The rest of your comment got lost as a duplicate; just to make sure other
people see it, what you wrote below was this:

> ... "um mau arranjo é melhor que um processo".

>

> Which can be translated to "a bad deal is still better than a lawsuit".

>

> Oh so Portuguese...

~~~
pseingatl
Or, "a bad settlement is better than a good trial."

~~~
severine
:) There's this spanish curse: "May you have lawsuits and win'em..." > "Tengas
pleitos y los ganes".

------
henrik_w
Ha ha, this reminds me of a Madonna interview in English, translated to
Hungarian, then back to English. Unfortunately it was fake, but nonetheless
pretty funny.

Sample: "I am a woman and not a test-mouse! Carlos is an everyday person who
is in the orbit of a star who is being muscle-trained by him, not a sex
machine."

[http://www.snopes.com/humor/misxlate/madonna.asp](http://www.snopes.com/humor/misxlate/madonna.asp)

------
tvst
Reminds me of Millor Fernandes's "The cow went to the swamp — A vaca foi pro
brejo", which is a book of Brazilian Portuguese sayings translated literally
to English. Pretty amusing.

[https://www.amazon.com/cow-went-swamp-English-
Portuguese/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/cow-went-swamp-English-
Portuguese/dp/8510325162)

------
to3m
I submit that a work of art with "a legacy that has lasted centuries" should
be more than ~1.6 of them old - no matter how little I can deny that 1.6 or so
is indeed enough to qualify for the plural.

~~~
khedoros
"How many centuries, did you say?"

"0.01 centuries."

------
Mz
_It is presumed that Carolino wrote the book through the aid of a Portuguese-
to-French dictionary and a French-to-English dictionary, using the former for
an initial translation of a word or phrase from Portuguese, and the latter to
convert it from French into English. The result, of course, is a mishmash of
cloudy gibberish._

Similarly, my sons watched a hilarious Let's Play of some game that had been
translated too many times and had somehow ended up using the F word to mean
something like "put in." So, every time you acquired an item, the game follows
this formula:

"(Character name)! (item name) bag fuck"

So in the LP an early example is

"Terry! drug bag fuck"

~~~
colanderman
You are thinking of Pokemon Crystal:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_bhwCgtXg&list=PL197CF5017...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_bhwCgtXg&list=PL197CF501757AB521)

------
Turing_Machine
Definitely a classic. I've been using "spits in the coat" for a long time,
e.g. "[local coffee roaster] spits in Starbucks' coat."

You can play a related game with Google Translate. Start with a phrase in say,
English, then translate to, say, Chinese, then Russian, then... and finally
back to English. The results are often amusing, and generally become more
bizarre the more languages there are in the intervening chain. Going back and
forth with non-Indo-European languages seems to make the phrase diverge from
its original semantics more quickly.

~~~
m-i-l
Like in Philip K Dick's 1969 book Galactic Pot Healer.

------
nicolas_t
I'd like to find a version of the book that includes the Portuguese. The
public domain version doesn't and only has the English...

~~~
tangus
The original is here:
[https://archive.org/details/onovoguiadaconve00fons](https://archive.org/details/onovoguiadaconve00fons)

The English version seems to be a selection of the funniest parts.

------
kinow
Created [https://speaklikeabrazilian.com](https://speaklikeabrazilian.com) to
help an Irish friend in Brazil to get used to expressions that would be
literally translated as "cucumber" or "to put up a tent" but that have a
completely different meaning.

------
syastrov
"a left handed": listed under "Defects of the body"

Under "Quadruped's beasts": "Dragon".

------
hamilyon2
So AYBABTU-style memes are much older than anyone thought. There is nothing
new under the sun.

------
11thEarlOfMar
It just begs to be a chatbot.

------
gcb0
this is how i see 99% of instructional YouTube videos

------
sorokod
Good source of passphrases.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
Fake. Not a totally bad fake, but many of the manglings are wrong.

For instance (p.58) "In the country of the blinds" should be "In land of
blinds", and no plural in man or king either.

No "Castles in Spain", either, it's "castles in the clouds".

Might be the work of a bored Englishman ...

~~~
rodelrod
Both of your examples are exactly what you'd get if you literally translate
from Portuguese to French and from that to English.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
It's kind of hard to make "castles in Spain" appear in any literal
translation, if the wording in the source language mentions the clouds instead
of Spain.

On the other hand, an Englishman would say "castles in Spain" ...

Same thing with land vs. country, although not so clear cut. The mangling is
being done by someone who knows the English idioms, not an ignorant native who
cannot even get basics like articles and plurals right.

~~~
tangus
Apparently he knew the English version of that one (or, as rodelrod said, he
just translated the French translation from a Portuguese-French guide. That
would somewhat explain the strange word "Espagnish").

In the original: Fazer torres de vento -- To build castles in Espagnish

There are several like that:

Tomar o ceo co' as maos -- Take the moon with the teeth

Ter memoria de gallo -- To have a hare memory

Comer o pao que o diabo amassou -- To eat of the cow mad (!?)

