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Re: [lojban] Portuguese was: my opinion on why lojban
On Monday 25 September 2006 15:38, M@ wrote:
> I once spent three weeks in brazil with 9 other programmers in my division.
> None of us spoke portugese, but betweent the 10 of us we managed to
> reconstruct enough spanish vocab to get our meanings across, so they can't
> be that different. It was actually pretty funny. The one portugese
> speaker (the waiter for instance) would say something and we'd all start
> working furiously to decode it, then come up with an answer, then attempt
> to encode it back to something he'd understand.
I spent two weeks in Portugal with a group and two weeks in Brazil by myself,
and got a few funnies myself. I asked for a tape, calling it "rubão", on the
analogy of French. The Portuguese didn't understand me. I found it, and he
told me it's a "fita". In a restaurant in Brazil, I asked where
the "cucharas" were. This time they did understand me. (The Portuguese
is "colheres", which is related, but you have to know a bit of etymology to
see it.)
When I came back from Brazil and was talking to Hispanics about my trip, I got
the languages completely mixed up. I said I had to "alfandegar" my luggage,
even though the Spanish word is closer to French "douane".
Pierre