Hello there! For those of you who do not know me, my name is Natália Araújo and I work as a localization engineer at Ccaps. I have wanted to write a post for the Ccaps Blog but, until now, I could not find anything interesting to write about. Let me try…
Every month, I go to the news stand in search of magazines about general subjects, which in one way or another, will enrich my cultural baggage. Interestingly enough, I came across a magazine specializing in subjects about the Portuguese language, called “Conhecimento Prático da Língua Portuguesa” (Practical Knowledge of the Portuguese Language). The cover of issue 18 called my attention as it had the following headline: “Latin, a language that never goes out of style”.
I wondered how come a dead language could not go out of style… Like any voracious reader, I leafed through the pages to read the story and realized that, even superficially, Latin should be taught to everyone. And exactly at that moment I thought: “It would be great to write a post about the proper use of language in the Ccaps Blog.”
Let’s see. Does any of you know where the word “university” comes from? There I discovered that it comes from the Latin “universitas”, which means “universe”. Another example is the verb “to delete”, which comes from the Latin “delere”, meaning “to destroy”. And much to my surprise, the second person plural of the imperative of the verb “delere” is “delete”, just like that button on your keyboard!
I spoke with some friends who study Languages and confirmed that they all fear case declinations, conjunctions and other things they need to memorize in Latin. On the other hand, they all believe that studying Latin would help (a lot!) the common Brazilian to better understand what they are saying.
We often make mistakes because we do not know the origins of what we are saying. For instance, what is the plural of the Portuguese words “nação,” “pão” and “cristão”? To answer that, we should pay attention to the suffix of these three words. They all end in “-ão”, which is an irregularity in the Portuguese language that presents us with three possibilities in the plural: “-ães”, “-ões” and “-ãos”. But which one is correct?
Had we learned Latin, we would not such doubts, as “nação” comes from the Latin “natione”, so the correct plural form is “nações;” “pão” comes from “pane,” so the correct plural form is “pães;” and “cristão” comes from the Latin word “christianu,” and the correct plural form is “cristãos.”
But the most intriguing part of the story was to find out that even the biggest scholars in the Portuguese Language also butcher the language without even realizing it. Can somebody tell me the correct word for somebody who loves chocolate in Portuguese? I believe most would say “chocólatra” (chocoholic), right? Yet “chocólatra” actually means “to adore a type of octopus called choco;” Chocolate lovers should be called “chocolatólatra”! Living and learning…
Then I had to revisit my concept that Latin, though no longer taught in high school, never stopped to be part of our daily lives.
Stay tuned for the next post on Portuguese trivia!
