Words are Electrical

The Portuguese for royal wedding is casamento real. Two hundred years ago Brazil was ruled by a monarch, which may explain why the word real means not only royal, but also reality. As if that weren't enough, in 1994, in an effort to combat runaway inflation, Brazil's currency was renamed from the cruzeiro to the “real.” Any word that can be money and reality and royalty signals a culture that takes its words seriously.

The foundation of human evolution is the development of language, and to continue to grow beyond the world of grunts, language must evolve. All languages are constantly changing, upgrading and refining, adding new words while old words fade away. That's why no one talks like Shakespeare although it's hard to imagine 450 years ago everyone in England spoke that way.

In Brazil, there's an official government institution, the Academia Brasileira de Letras, which supervises changes in the language. In 2008 two new letters were added to the language, K and W, ensuring the alphabet would coincide with the identical 26 letters of English. It's not surprising that English and Portuguese have the same alphabet as Brazil strives to enter the international world of commerce.

A Brazilian businessman who owns a chain of jewelry stores was interested in practicing his conversational English. He told me he was planning to meet with Chinese wholesale gem suppliers in Bangkok to negotiate purchases for his two dozen jewelry stores. He said, “Even if I could speak a little Chinese, enough to negotiate prices, they would have the advantage in the meeting. I need to speak English with them, so nobody has a better position.”

English is continually flooded with new words, particularly in technology where companies like Facebook, Intel, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco are creating new horizons on a daily basis. Many of these new words begin as slang then enter mainstream vocabulary and eventually filter into other languages. Brazilians use the words Internet, Facebook, and Google the same way they are used in English. There are other English words here like “show” and “taxi.” Only recently have English words entered conversational Portuguese with the same English pronunciation. Previously, American companies operating in Brazil had their names redefined. For example, Quaker was pronounced like the duck sound, quack. And Xerox is still said  using the Portuguese sound for X, which is sh – Sherox.

Besides the challenge of adapting to US technology, Portuguese has its own convoluted route of evolution with multiple challenges. There are two different spellings for the number 14 -- quatorze and catorze. Besides adding two new letters to the alphabet, Portuguese linguists disagree on how many verb tenses there are. Some language teachers accept tinha falado as a verb tense in conversational Portuguese because it mirrors the present perfect tense in English. It's the only way to translate “I have spoken” into Portuguese. However, this has yet to pass muster with the Academia. Nevertheless, the Academia does recognize a new way to create the future tense, a formation that has come into use among young people in only the last five years or so. The new verb tense is called futuro imediato, and is a much easier conjugation to master. English is growing with new vocabulary, but the number of verb tenses in English hasn't been altered.

I love watching Brazilian students work diligently to learn English. I can see the neurons firing  as they strive to translate their thoughts into English. Sometimes they express themselves with an invented phrase that is nonsensical. “My sister is electrical” is meaningless yet beautiful.

All languages are vibrant and charged with royal energy. Watching people dive into the exploration of a new language is highly electrical.