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)
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.
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.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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Like I said, no coffee yet. Gah. I know this stuff, really :P