Christian Weisgerber <
[email protected]> wrote:
On 2023-11-13, Antonio Marques <[email protected]d> wrote:
Mão na cabeça! -- Hands (hand) on your head!
Abre o olho! -- Open your eyes (eye)!
Tá achando que esse teu olho azul vai te salvar de alguma porra?
In either case, it’s not specific to body parts.
When it’s nuance… using the singular (in these examples) makes the sentence
refer to the entire class rather than the specific instances. It’s
redundant since (again in these cases) the plural would address all the
relevant instances of the class…
Can you give an example where there would be a clear distinction?
I’m not sure. Taking one of your samples, _esse teu olho azul_ would tend
to refer to all of the physically valued attributes of the addressee (which might even not have blue eyes, in an extreme but possible case), whereas
_esses teus olhos azuis_ would tend to be literal.
A separate phenomenon is the general loss of the plural marker in
brazilian, but that is not (yet) unmarked colloquial.
I was totally stumped by sentences like "Os cara querem que ..."
until it dawned on me that some plural markers are being elided.
Or even _Os cara quer que…_.
But unlike the previous case this is still marked.
Googling on the subject found some articles that confirm that there's
a trend to mark the plural only once in a noun phrase, typically
at the start. (This reminds me of the trend in German to mark the
genitive case only once in a noun phrase.)
Oh, I didn’t know about that one.
There are also other instances of missing -s. "Vamo!" instead of
"vamos!" is common. And "mermo" instead of "mesmo". I don't know
what to make of this. It is reminiscent of the Spanish shift
-s > /h/ > -0, but I don't think that a general soundshift is
underway.
No, not general. I’d say this -mo for the P2 is between the two previous phenomena in terms of markedness.
‘Memo’ is a lexical thing, and it happens in Portugal. Some years ago, the then minister of Education, a writer, actually recorded a video message intended for mid-schoolers where she clearly said _mem’, mem’, mem’_ for ‘really, really, really’, about the impawtance ob moaning breffast. Now, I don’t have a link for that one, but I’ll leave you with a twin in which she still throws a memo around 3.50
https://youtu.be/xQ1111KszKA - I suggest
you watch the whole, it’s incredibly edifying.
Also, Brazil is an enormous country and there are clearly different
varieties interacting. One character has traveled deep into Amazonia ("Manaus: 853 Km") and a local there uses second person verb forms!
Ha. They do know about those. As to regional differences in these
phenomena, there is some data at
https://pt.slideshare.net/israellima75/preconceito-lingustico-marta-scherre, but I don’t know its accuracy. One would believe that in the north and far south S2 forms are still kicking. But I have never met anyone who’d use
them by default.
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