Re:The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)
by ratww on Friday January 14, 2022 @10:55AM
(#29935985)
I was really surprised at how close the alphabet letters are pronounced in German and Portuguese.
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Though I don't speak Portuguese myself, my immediate family roots are Azorean and grew up among the huge Azorean population surrounding New Bedford and Fall River, so I've heard it regularly for my entire life. I lived a bit further north during High School and regularly encountered folks from Russia and the Ukraine. I thought I was crazy for thinking spoken pt-PT and Russian sounded similar from a distance. However, my best friend who grew up in St. Petersburg and has a degree in linguistics said he often does a double-take when hearing pt-PT speakers on the street! He had some sort of technical explanation for it (that didn't stick in my head being a non-linguist and (sadly) monolingual.)
It’s because Pt-Pt is a stressed timed language vs Br-Pt which is a syllable timed language.
Pt-Pt drops a lot of unstressed vowels whereas Br-Pt almost all syllables are pronounced.
Langfocus did a video on why (European) Português sounds like Russian.
me too. I grew-up between Germany and Brazil and now I live mainly in Portugal. In the beginning I was amused by that too. Now I can really speak PT-PT. Even "Ja" can be used to say yes.