Never use a cruelty when a joke will do in its place

The tilde represents a "nasalized vowel" and is just like any other accented vowel in that it has it's own distinct sound. According to one source I found, "the most distinguishing feature of Portuguese spelling is the use of tildes on vowels (ã), which indicates nasalization in certain diphthongs. This accounts for the fact that some Portuguese words (e.g. São Paulo) sound like they contain the letter n when they really don't. The tilde occurs exclusively in diphthongs (e.g. ãe, ão, õe), and is not always printed, but it's still easy to recognize these diphthongs and infer that the sounds should be nasalized."

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Not having ever heard a Portugese speaker say "São", it's hard for me to imagine what "s-a-o" sounds like with an implied "n" sound.

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Just say it like you're from New Jersey.

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"SeAoW PAWWWL-oh"

Aye lassie, tis a frightening prospect, that.

</shudders>

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illscientist.livejournal.com

*draws pistols*

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them's fightin' words?
;-)

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It's a bit hard to explain a sound through text, particuarly if you can't read IPA. So have you never heard someone speak Portuguese, or just never identified that sound as the tilde'd vowel? If you've ever seen Love Actually or listened to any good Brasilero music (Jobim, for example), you can hear the sound. There's a good, understandable description of nasalized vowel sounds here (http://www.garretwilson.com/education/languages/hindi/devanagari/lesson5/candrabindu.html) (though it's for a different language, the concept of nasalization is the same -- check out the third paragraph).

Does that help at all?

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If pressed, I could tell spoken Portugese from spoken Spanish, but what kind of Portugese or Spanish would be beyond me. And I sold my Getz/Gilberto CD cuz I was broke. Gah.

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THat is an excellent explanation. In historical sound change, there actually was an "n" between those now dipthonged vowels... Like in the Spanish "mano" which is "mão" in Portuguese.

Incidentally, the little carrot hat you see in French in words like "fête" represents where an "s" used to be in the corresponding older form (Lat. festum, It. festa).

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Well I'll be. The mano/mão example makes sense to me as far as pronunciation - almost like there's a 'hump' (nasalization) between the "ah" and "oh" sounds?

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Exactly! The humping you describe is actually the raising of your velum, a fleshy piece of, um, flesh in the back of your throat that we use to make nasals.

(I'm so happy you asked this question---it makes me feel like I haven't wasted the last three years of my life studying phonetics.)

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It's a noble endeavor. In fact, as soon as I'm done will all this rock & roll hoo-ha, I may ramble down that same road.

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Man, all this talk of velums (vela?) is getting me hot. I miss school a lot and I especially miss my linguistic classes.

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rockstarbob.livejournal.com

Oy! You can listen to the beautiful Brazilian pronunciation of these sounds here:

http://www.saunalahti.fi/~huuhilo/portuguese/gb_greetings.htm

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I was hoping you'd comment :)

That's totally weird...but maybe not, now that I look at it - "tchau!" for "bye" looks a hell of a lot like the German "tchuss!", which means the same thing. I wonder if both are cribbed from "ciao"?

And I would have expected a "y" sound in "Até já!"

Have studied any of the other Iberian-area languages (i.e. Provençal, etc)? (That goes for all y'all, btw)

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rockstarbob.livejournal.com

I've only got experience with Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and the teeniest bit of Catalan. Japanese, too, but that's not what you were asking.

Brazilian Portuguese is one of the most beautiful languages I've ever studied, though. It has all the best parts of all the romance languages all rolled into one.

What's got you axing about it, out of curiosity?

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I just got on a tangent...I was looking at a Brazilian website, and it got me thinking about how I had no clue how to pronounce the ~ vowels.

Most of the time that I'm not thinking about music, I'm thinking about words. I'm just that kind of nerd.

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I'm sure that "tchau" and "ciao" are related, simply because both Portuguese and Italian are Romance languages (as in, they're probably both cribbed from Latin, not necessarily one from the other). It's really cool when you can start to see connections between two languages, if not in spelling, in sound. Other linguistic fun times: seeing structural similarity between two languages which are not in the same family.

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Indeed. That's why I'm interested in "tchuss". Here's my 5-second-haven't-had-any-coffee-yet theory: "tchuss" was a recent export from Italy north to Germany. The Teutonic tongue couldn't quite wrap itself around the more mellifluous "ciao" and instead substituted a surlier, more Deutsch sounding ending involving gnashing of teeth and snake-like hissing.

Erm...probably not, but unless the idea behind "bye!" in this form goes back to where Romance and Germanic languages became distinct from one another, I'd guess that it's a recent borrowing.

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I suppose a German etymological dictionary would be of some use here (it's easy to find the roots of ciao, but I would imagine is it considerably more difficult to find tchuss, simply because it's not a word Americans have adopted). Sadly, I have none at my disposal.

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