On a blog called Numismática Bentes, I found a fairly long written history (in PT) of moedas coloniais (colonial coins) of Brazil as well as some pictures of these coins that I hope he/she doesn’t mind me posting. For a quick conversion, one modern-day real, with inflation considered, is worth 2,750,000,000,000,000,000 réis.
(from Minas Gerais, worth 20,000 mil réis, in 1720s)
(from Minas Gerais, worth 12,800 mil réis, in 1720s)
(from Minas Gerais, worth 960 réis, in 1808-09)
(worth 480 réis, from late 1600s to early 1700s)
(Dutch-made, from Pernambuco, worth XII florins, in 1645)
The Bem-Te-Vi (or Great Kiskadee in English), is a perching bird. It is also what is known as a large tyrant flycatcher, which perches high up looking for insects to catch in-flight and the brightly-colored bird is known to populate the tropical areas of South America. Its signature call sounds like “BEE-tee-WEE”, where it gets its name in Portuguese from (because it sounds like bem-te-vi, meaning “I saw you well” in English).
In order to protect its young, it employs a mobbing behavior against preditors in which it individually or collectively harrasses the unwelcome visitor by making swift diving motions. If you’ve lived in Brazil, you may not have been able to recognize the bird, but surely you’ll recognize the bird call below.
For the Youtube link above, here’s my transcription. These are all idiomatic expressions (in Portuguese) that, as you can see, shouldn’t be used literally in English! For the format, I’ll post their Portuguese version, literal English version, then what they really mean in English.
É nóis na fita! Is we in the tape! Of course!/That’s it!
Chá comigo que eu livro sua cara.* Tea with me that I book your face. Let me handle it.
Eu sou mais eu. I am more I. I am more myself.
Você quer um bom-bom? Do you want a good-good? (suggest a translation)
Nem vem que não tem! Not even come that it doesn’t have! Don’t even try/Don’t get smart with me!
Ela é cheia de nove horas. She is full of nine o’clock. She’s full of excuses.
Tô careca de saber. I am completely bald of knowing it. There’s nothing new about that (fact).
Oh! Queimei meu filme! Ooh! I burned my movie! Wow! I screwed up my chance!
Vou lavar a égua. I will wash the mare. I will do well in this situation.
Vai catar coquinho! Go catch little coconuts! Get lost!
Se correr, o bicho pega, se ficar o bicho come! If you run, the beast catches; if you stay, the beast eats! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! (Catch-22)
Antes tarde do que nunca. Before afternoon than never. Better late than never.
Tire o cavalinho da chuva. Take out the little horse from the rain. Give up, don’t insist.
A vaca foi pro brejo! The cow went to the swamp! What’s done is done!
Dar uma de João-sem-Braço. To give one of John the Armless. To play stupid.
* – Chá is a mistranslation of ‘xa which is a quick and informal way of saying deixa (from the verb deixar which means to allow, to leave).
I wanted to apologize if you find posts where my videos teaching Portuguese should be because I’ve deleted them from Youtube. I realize they helped people learn Portuguese and I pretty much only received positive responses from them but I don’t know…since I reached a certain level, I started to feel like it was about vanity to post videos of myself, talking about my knowledge. Perhaps it has to do with my current mood, which is to erase most of my online presence (minus these blogs). In the meantime, I’ll look for an audio solution and if found, I’ll redo the lessons. Don’t fret though because I transcribed the video lessons and included them in the posts.
A casa do caralho (the house of…caralho*) is another Brazilian expression which means somewhere far away.
Ex. O churrasco foi bom mas foi na casa do caralho!
Ex. The bbq was nice but it was way out in the middle of nowhere!
* - Caralho is a bad word, meaning a certain male organ or used as an exclamation of anger.
A Casa-da-Mãe-Joana
A casa-da-mãe-joana means a place or situation where everything goes, without order, where confusion and disorganization reign free. Its origin is in the 14th century.
Ex. O lugar virou a casa-da-mãe-joana!
Ex. The place became a complete pig-sty!
History
Câmara Cascudo (a Brazilian anthropologist) teaches that the expression owes itself to Joan I of Naples, that lived in the Middle Ages between 1326 and 1382 and was the queen of Naples and the countess of Provence. She had a troubled life and in 1346, went to live in Avignon in France, according to some authors, for having involved herself in a conspiracy in Naples against her husband Andrew, and according to others, for being exiled by the church due to an unruly life.
In 1347, at 21 years old, Joan regulated the bordellos of the city where she lived in refuge. There, it was often heard: “The place will have a door that anyone can go through.” Once brought to Portugal, the expression “paço-da-mãe-joana” (palace of mother Joana) became synonymous with house of prostitution.
When brought to Brazil, the term paço, for not being a popular term, was substituted for casa and the phrase, Casa-da-mãe-Joana and it worked, by extension, to indicate the place or situation where everyone does what they wish, where disorder and disorganization rule.
Fila (line, row) is the term for a queue or line, not linha, even though that seems like a perfect fit. Be careful not to write or say filha (daughter) because if someone thinks you cut their daughter, they might cortar something of yours. In English, there are many words or phrases that can precede ‘line’, such as ‘jump the’ or ‘butt in’. And if you get really mixed up and end up saying “I jumped your daughter” (Eu tive relações com a sua filha), well, that might also provoke violence.
Cutting in line – Furar a fila or cortar a fila. The verb furar means to pierce or puncture something.
Faixa (f)
Faixa means lane, strip, band, ribbon, zone or crosswalk. When trying to stay within your lane on the road, that lane is a faixa, which in general is often disregarded in Brazil. Faixa can also be used to express a range such as faixa etária (age range) or faixa salarial (salary range).
Another way to express ‘approximate range’ is to use estar na casa de (to be in the house of) such as “ele está na casa de 20 anos” (he’s around 20 years old) or even estar no campo de…visão (to be in the field of…vision), for example. In English, we might say someone is “in the ballpark”, ballpark being the field where baseball is played.
The Brazilian favela…it can be a complicated thing to navigate, literally and figuratively. The reason behind their existence is a tad bit easier to explain so I’ll start with that.
“Although there is no consensus about the precise time the first favela appeared, it is generally agreed upon that 1897 was the year the first large one was started. It was in November of that year that 20,000 Northeastern federal troops, who had fought and won the Canudos’s war against Antônio Conselheiro in Bahia, were brought to Rio and left on the docks without a place to live. Tired of waiting for the government’s bureaucracy, which couldn’t find them a house after having promised them one, they just took over the closest hill in a neighborhood known as Gamboa, to build their improvised shacks.” – Brazzil
The other origin comes from the following,
“Some of the older favelas were originally started as quilombos (independent settlements of fugitive African slaves) among the hilly terrain of the area surrounding Rio, which later grew as slaves were liberated in 1888 with no place to live. The favelas were formed prior to the dense occupation of cities and the domination of real estate interests.” – Wikipedia
Some of the main problems that arise when the subject is talked about are criminality and the lack of alternatives to it (as the documentary Manda Bala states, the poor rob with a gun and the rich, with a pen), the lack of infrastructure and education, and the general lack of interest by those in power to help change the resident’s living situation (during more than a century of existence). Some good comes from NGOs and some good comes from within the favela itself (Viva Rio, Afro Reggae, Dois Irmãos) which can take the form of an NGO.
Looking at the problems, one sees the solutions. Give the residents a chance at education and thereby give them an alternative to joining a favela gang, give them infrastructure and basic rights such as ownership of their land, and also give them a way to have a real place to call home. What it all comes down to is treat them like citizens and like people. When they don’t feel they are doomed to repeat what their parents and grandparents went through, they will do the rest on their own. On the last part where I say ‘give them a way to have a real place to call home’, there are some examples emerging and time will tell if they work out or not. What I do know is if the government just gives a little (read about Public Housing, also called ‘the projects’), the favela as we know it will simply become a modern favela with most of the same problems.
I’ll finish with links to two articles which are aimed at ways to, in one example, turn favelas into ‘the projects’, and in another, to create public housing to fill a temporary need. Both examples absolutely require some critical thinking skills or in other terms, why would such an idea be bad for those on the receiving end? The credit system of always owing someone (usually a multinational financial company) something is tantamount to indentured servitude, as is the majority of the taxation system. It’s no coincidence that the countries in the ‘Axis of Evil’, as well as those associated with it, are those not tied to the IMF. My educated guess is that the flip side of these efforts to provide public housing aren’t altruistic and if someone thinks that NGOs can pick up the slack in any way, I’d suggest the film “Quanto Vale ou É Por Quilo?“.
In Portuguese, these are called duplas sertanejas (something like ‘country music duos’) and in general, their get-ups are a bit cheesy. Check out some classics! Special note of mention to “Conde e Dracula” and “Batima e Robson”!
One of my favorite tags in Italian is “dai” which the blog Dolce Vita explains in the following excerpt,
“Dai” said with an irritated tone can mean “enough” or “stop it”. It can also mean “come on” in all its many forms – impatience, encouragement and the gritted teeth of effort or tension if you’re following you favourite football team in that moment and it’s about time they scored a goal.
“Ma dai” can indicate mild suprise, incredulity or even suspicion that your interlocutor is pulling your leg. It can be a kind of “as if” or “stop having me on”. “Dai” said with a lowered tone and widened eyes will often be found in gossip and can mean “tell me more”!
In Portuguese, ‘vai’ can be used as an informal tag on the end of a statement such as when someone says “me leva, vai!” (c’mon, take me!). Just a hypothesis based on the huge influx of Italians to Brazil during the time prior to and just after the turn of the last century.
There’s a legend that says the mandú, a character from Bahian folklore, came to be through the story of a couple that was constantly fighting. During one of their fights, the husband prayed for a plague so that his pregnant wife would have a son with crooked legs. And so it was. They had three handicapped children and went to live shamefully in the jungle. During the Iemanja festival, they went to the streets, dressed so that they could not be seen.
These days, the people of Cachoeira (in the Recôncavo region of Bahia) dress themselves as mandús during festivals and walk down the streets singing and giving off an air of mystery. It is believed that if one is touched by the mandú as it walks by, then they will become a carrier of a bad spirit too. This folkloric mandú is a remaking of the mandú represented in the worship of the dead and is seen as a spirit of light that is still evolving. In the Recôncavo, it is common to hear the expressions “Sai daqui, mandú!” (Get out of here, mandú!) and “Lá vai o mandú!” (There goes the mandú!) to refer to unwanted people.
These and other stories are full of mystery, where the most important thing is the wisdom found in living side by side with the unknown.
