European/Brazilian Portuguese Differences

[langover94]

I don't know how many of you exactly are well-versed in Portuguese phonology shifts, but as I was studying I had a couple of questions and I knew that this would be the best place to go for answers.

1. Why is it that there is a difference between <ti> and <di> in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese? In Brazil, they are pronounced [tSi] and [dZi], but in Portugal they are pronounced [ti] and [di]. I couldn't think of a way that a shift like this would happen simply from a language crossing the ocean, but I have a feeling that Tupi-Guarani might have something to do with it.

2. Why did the [l] ---> /u/ shift happen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is a feature unique to both variants of Portuguese as opposed to other romance languages. I personally like it a lot.

3. In Brazilian Portuguese, why is <s> when before a consonant and at the end of a word generally pronounced as [S]? Does this happen in European Portuguese?

There probably aren't clear-cut answers for at least a couple of these, but I just thought I would ask. Thanks!

[alice]

There probably aren't clear-cut answers for at least a couple of these, but I just thought I would ask. Thanks!

Really, it's nothing more than regular sound change, which can usually be explained at least in part by entropy.

[Hakaku]

1. Affrication is relatively common in natural languages and is often associated with high vowels and palatalization. Some examples include:
- Canadian French, which has [tsi] and [tsy] for /ti/ and /ty/, and [dzi] and [dzy] for /di/ and /dy/, where standard French would have [ti], [ty], [di] and [dy].
- Acadian French, which has [tʃ] instead of [k] or [tj] in front of front vowels, and [dʒ] for [g] and [dj] before front vowels.
- Japanese, which pronounces /ti/ and /tu/ as [tɕi] and [tsu] respectively, and /di/ and /du/ as [dʑi~ʑi] and [dzu~zu].

Some languages also assimilate the previous vowel, which then palatalizes the following consonant. For example, Okinawan *kaitaru > katɕaru "writing"; or *ɸito > *çitu > tɕu "person".

2. This is called L-vocalization, and it's actually quite a common phenomenon in Romance Languages, but also occurs in other languages including dialects of English (milk > [mɪwk]). In languages like French, the process was later followed by vowel coalescence (e.g. *bel > beau [bo]; *novel > nouveau [nuvo]; *à+le > au [o]), but the spelling with <u> often reflects the older pronunciation.

3. Couldn't tell you about this one since I don't know anything about Portuguese. Does it always occur as /ʃ/, or only within the vicinity of certain sounds?

[Taernsietr]

1. Why is it that there is a difference between <ti> and <di> in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese? In Brazil, they are pronounced [tSi] and [dZi], but in Portugal they are pronounced [ti] and [di]. I couldn't think of a way that a shift like this would happen simply from a language crossing the ocean, but I have a feeling that Tupi-Guarani might have something to do with it.

This isn't as widespread as you may think in Brazil. Southern dialects don't have this and I think part of the Northern region also doesn't have this.

2. Why did the [l] ---> /u/ shift happen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is a feature unique to both variants of Portuguese as opposed to other romance languages. I personally like it a lot.

If you mean that Portuguese has <u> /u/ whereas some Romance languages kept <l> /l/ from Latin, it's pretty much L-vocalization, I think, as Hakaku pointed out. It still happens in B. Portuguese - coda /l/ is pronounced as [w] in every dialect, AFAIK.

3. In Brazilian Portuguese, why is <s> when before a consonant and at the end of a word generally pronounced as [S]? Does this happen in European Portuguese?

I don't know the name of this particular process, but since Portuguese doesn't have phonemic coda /S/, I guess it follows the affricativization before palatals.

Also, this doesn't happen at all in Southern Brazilian dialects; I'd wager some dialects in Portugal also don't have this (AFAIK it does happen there too).

[Whimemsz]

1. Why is it that there is a difference between <ti> and <di> in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese? In Brazil, they are pronounced [tSi] and [dZi], but in Portugal they are pronounced [ti] and [di]. I couldn't think of a way that a shift like this would happen simply from a language crossing the ocean, but I have a feeling that Tupi-Guarani might have something to do with it.

That's not the right way to look at it. The way to look at it is that affrication of stops before high and/or front vowels is a very common change cross-linguistically; and after the settlement of Brazil by Portuguese-speakers, the speech of Brazilians and Portuguese diverged over the centuries because of the decreased contact (it's easier to share sound changes with people who live one town over than people who live a three-month (or something like that) boat journey across the ocean). So one of the changes that occurred in some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, but didn't spread to Portugal, is this affrication of /ti, di/ to /tSi dZi/.

[Ziz]

Brazilian Portuguese just took coda /l/ one step further. In E. Portuguese, it's [ɫ], but in B. Portuguese it's pretty much [w] everywhere. The /s/ to [ʃ] change in syllable codas is by no means a universal feature of B. Portuguese; rather, it's found mainly in the Carioca dialect, which is spoken primarily in Rio de Janeiro. However, this change is pretty much universal in all dialects of E. Portuguese. Other dialects of B. Portuguese insert [j] before syllable coda /s/ in a stressed syllable, such that mas "but" becomes [majs] and therefore homophonous with mais "more."

[zompist]

Sound changes tend to follow patterns, but there's no answer to why any particular sound change occurs.

If the underlying question is "is separation across an ocean for a few centuries enough to create some sound changes?", then yes, it sure is. For more examples look at American vs British English, or Dutch vs Afrikaans, or Parisian French vs Joual. (For Spanish the changes are more at the lexical level, though there's the seseo distinguishing the standard languages.)

[Imralu]

I used to have a friend from Portugal. He taught me how to say "Where are you?" which was "Onde é que estás" from memory. He pronounced it something like [ɔ̃dekʃtaʃ], so that [s] > [ʃ] is also present in Portugal. I've since had a lot of Brazilian students and it's only the ones from Rio who pronounce syllable final <s> as [ʃ].

My Portuguese friend pronounced <de> ("of") as something like [dɯ]. My Brazilian students pronounce it as [de] ~ [di] ~ [dʒi].

There's a lot of variation. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest reliable differences between the language in these two countries is the fact that European Portuguese reduces unstressed vowels so much that <esperamos que> ("we hope that") can sometimes sound something like [ʃpɾamʃk] in Portugual, but the closest I've heard to that from a Brazilian's mouth was something like [ɪʃpɪˈɾaːmʊʃkɪ], although even that is probably distorting the vowels too much.

[sirdanilot]

I don't know how many of you exactly are well-versed in Portuguese phonology shifts, but as I was studying I had a couple of questions and I knew that this would be the best place to go for answers.

1. Why is it that there is a difference between <ti> and <di> in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese? In Brazil, they are pronounced [tSi] and [dZi], but in Portugal they are pronounced [ti] and [di]. I couldn't think of a way that a shift like this would happen simply from a language crossing the ocean, but I have a feeling that Tupi-Guarani might have something to do with it.

A very obvious sound change like that couldn't happen when two populations of speakers are separated by an ocean for a couple of centuries? Also, this doesn't happen in the North of Brazil, I have heard.

2. Why did the [l] ---> /u/ shift happen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is a feature unique to both variants of Portuguese as opposed to other romance languages. I personally like it a lot.

What the other guys said, also, Catalan does it too I believe.

3. In Brazilian Portuguese, why is <s> when before a consonant and at the end of a word generally pronounced as [S]? Does this happen in European Portuguese?

This happens in EurPor and at least in Carioca (perhaps other Brazilian accents too). I think it is because Portuguese doesn't really like codas a lot, and thus inserts a reduced vowel at the end; this has the value of in BrPor (at least), which palatalizes the /s/ to [ʃ]. Not sure how this went for EurPor, since reduced vowels often sound like [ɯ] or something like that to me. This might be a more progressive state of the sound change, though; my very Carioca cousin pronounces /ʒeˈlado/ as [ʒəˈladɯ] or something like that. (the /o/ is reduced in this word, hence the analogy). If every reduced vowel at the end of words gets that value, BrPor might develop an interesting extra phonemic distinction between /d/ and /dʒ/,

[jal]

my very Carioca cousin pronounces /ʒeˈlado/ as [ʒəˈladɯ] or something like that.

This is regular allophony though, unstressed vowels changing quality (Wikipedia says "the vowels /a ɛ e ɔ o/ tend to be raised to [ɐ e i ɨ o u] (although [ɨ] occurs only in EP) when they are unstressed").


JAL

[Ketumak]

My Portuguese friend pronounced <de> ("of") as something like <dɯ>. My Brazilian students pronounce it as <de> ~ <di> ~ <dʒi>.

I can confirm this. I was taught it by an evening class tutor who'd lived in both Portugal and Brazil. He had another example:
saudade is /saudaD@/ in Portugal and /saudadZi/ in Brazil. (Not sure about the exact nature of the vowel I marked as /@/)

On l, its worth adding that pluralisation turns final l into i on both sides of the Atlantic. So floral becomes florais. Being final, these ls are stressed which may be a factor.

We can't posit a permanent sound shift from stressed l to i because of the presence of words like salsa (=parsley, I think). The change just affects modern Port. plurals. Maybe one day it will become more widespread though? Perhaps the most we can safely say for now is that Portuguese l is simply recessive in some general sense.

On final s, it is often /S/, if the next word begins with a voiceless consonant, but can be /Z/ if the next word starts with a voiced consonant, or /z/ if it starts with a vowel. The voiced/less thing isn't surprising, though I don't know where the post-alveolar switch comes from.

[So Haleza Grise]

The Brazilian Portuguese speakers I know (Minas Gerais, mostly) elide the final vowel of the -dade ending altogether, to -[dadZ].