Every few years the self-appointed owners of the Portuguese idiom, the grammarians, decide to "refine" the language. They place a k here, they take an accent there and bring back what they took two decades ago. They are at it again, those

Idiom idiots

Wilson Velloso

The spelling of the Portuguese language has undergone another "reform". What else is new? Yawn, yawn, yawn.

Why do the continental Portuguese, who invented the language, and the Brazilians, who picked it up on the rebound, and slaughter it at all levels, bother to go into this empty but contentious exercise from time to time?

Because: 1) they cherish the delusion that you can write a language exactly as it is spoken. Or speak it precisely as it is written.

(2) perhaps they envy their Spanish-speaking neighbors, who claim to enjoy the only perfect phonetic spelling in the Western world. Pretty good spelling, yes; even excellent. But perfect, no! What about México, Ximena, Ximenez and a few other flies in the ointment? Shouldn't all that be spelled with a J?

3) they forget — or maybe never learned — a science called "etymology," which traces the origin and the development of a word and its changes in form and meaning. Etymology tells us that the cereal we eat for breakfast must be spelled with a C but a part of a TV soap opera, or of a novel, shown or published in installments, is serial with an S. Why? Because one comes from the Latin cerealis while the other comes from Latin serere (to put in a row).

(Believe it or not, it applies to all European languages. And I don't say all languages because I know nothing about native American, Asian, African, or Oceanic languages.)

(4) with time, Brazilians have grown to believe that they must be the smartest nation on earth: don't they understand Spanish while the Spanish-speaking people don't understand spoken Portuguese? (See "Are Brazilian Smarter?" BRAZZIL - News from Brazil - June 1995). This eventually turns into a kind of solipsism, a condition that also affects many Americans.

In the not too distant past, Brazilian kids living in rural areas used to play with a little wooden square-sided top, the piorra, also called "rapa-põe-tira-deixa" (take all-put one-take half-pass). This descendant of the multisecular Jewish deirdle (with the Hebrew letters gimmel, shin, hay, nun meaning approximately the same) is played by two or more children, who give the piorra a spin with their fingers and, when it falls down, use pieces of candy, ball player cards, marbles, or small coins to pay or collect the prize. They say that even grown men are known do the same with folding money.

In the matter of reforming Portuguese spelling, it seems that grammarians and other practitioners of esoteric arts have often used a piorra. Take it out, put it in, take half, pass.

Consider for instance the letters K, Y, and W, which had been banished from the alphabet (" sent to Clevelândia" the Brazilian equivalent of a Gulag) more than 50 years ago as part of a reform that did a few useful things. Such as eliminating the groups ph (sounding like fl, th (sounding like plain t), and ch (when sounding like k in "chimica or chemistry. It also adopted a profusion of accents in many words that didn't need them.

In May 1995 k-w-y were triumphantly reintroduced into the Portuguese alphabet with the backing of fans and followers of the late Brazilian poet Guilherme de Almeida, and cries of anguish by publishers, schoolteachers, and others. In fact, the whining from publishers is sheer posturing, pure baloney. Publishers don't withdraw and destroy books done in a "previous" spelling: they sell'em.

As with kwy, the trema — two dots on top of a vowel in a diphthong — had a similar fate. In Romance languages, the trema indicates a diaeresis, or separate pronunciation of each vowel. Portuguese used it only on u (after g or q) to show that you had to pronounce u. Therefore quente (warm, hot) sounds like kente, while freqüente is pronounced freh-coo-ente (frequent). The trema was abolished (perhaps to come back in another 20 or 30 years). Now you are on your own, brother, like in English: either you know it or you don't. How to pronounce aguentar? Is it ah-goo-en-tahr (to bear, suffer), or is it ah-gen-tahr with a hard g as in get ?

Frankly, in a language where x is pronounced x in sexo (sex); sh as in xarope (syrup); s as in texto (text); ss as in próximo; and z as in exame (examination), neither the recovery of the three letters, nor the demise of the trema makes much difference. Actually, because few bothered with tremar tranqüilo (tranquil), radio/TV announcers and lesser lights are already saying trankilo. Spanish influence?

A HYPHENATED TEAR

I cry a small tear, though, for the passing of the hyphen. The orthography negotiators lost sight of how useful the hyphen was in differentiating meaning. In English, although we have the craziest and most complicated spelling ever, we did adopt the usage of writing as a single compound word, each which with its own meaning. Thus, we may serve dinner on a round table — a table that is round — while we hold a roundtable discussion — with a round table or none — to refer to a meeting in which participants are theoretically all equal. The same with parachute, handout, gerrymander.

Portuguese does the same with some terms, but not all. It is all very convoluted, and confusing. Some prefixes such as pós, pré, and pró demand the hyphen (pós-guerra, pré-natal, pró-liberdade). The hyphen is also de rigueur when the prefix ends in a vowel and the second word begins with an unaspirated h (anti-higiênico). That's easy: there is no aspirated h in Portuguese. Ergo, the hyphen is necessary when a prefix ending in a vowel is used and a vowel is the first letter of the second word (quase-ascético).

Prefixes ending in r — hiper, inter and super — call for hyphen when the second word also begins with r (hiper-rentável, inter-rodoviário, super-rico). The prefixes ex, sota, soto, vice, and vizo all demand hyphen (soto-mestre, second master, vice-presidente Vice President). Even vizo, which is obsolete and used only in archaisms: not even dictionary makers remember it.

With two other prefixes, circum and pan, a hyphen is required if the second element begins with a vowel, to avoid the pronunciation ma, me, mi, mo, mu or na, ne, ni, no, nu (circum-escolar, pan-americano). Incidentally, this rule is as old as the hill.

Another old rule retained: If the second word after a prefix ending in a vowel begins with r or s, the hyphen is dropped and the consonant is doubled (hiporregado, teutorrusso). On the other hand, in terms containing a prefix ending in a vowel followed by a word also beginning with a (different) vowel, kill the hyphen (antiaéreo)! Confusing? That's the spirit.

THINNING OUT ACCENTS

Speaking in general terms, fewer accents are now in use. Some of the now dead were extremely silly, like the one on the syllables éi and ói, assembléias (assemblies) and jóia (jewel), now assembleias and joia. A little silliness subsists when the vocalic group at the end of a word keeps the accent, like papéis (papers) and dodói (sick, in baby talk). The circumflex is dropped in the double oo in words such as vôo (flight) and enjôo (nausea) now voo and enjoo; same on the double ee which used to distinguish singular and plural of verbs as vêem, lêem now simply veem and leem.

The (acute) accent was eliminated in words with more than one meaning but the same spelling. Bitten by the bobeira (stupidity) virus, past negotiators had decided that pelo (hair) should be covered, pêlo, while the other pelo (a contraction = by the) was uncovered. The accent made a difference between two meanings. The acme of the stupidity was tôda (all, entire, fem.) not to be confused with toda, an ancient Dravidian language of India. In the same case were pára! (stop) and para (preposition = for or toward).

However, this virus is highly antibiotic-resistant: because even now a verb needs a hat when it is pôr (to put, place). Their fear is that Lusophones may think it is por (by), a preposition. Ditto ditto with pode, present tense of poder; and pôde, its past tense.

The reforming grammarians never thought that in English we say: I read (now), I read (yesterday) and the book is read (past participle), without any diacritics to show which is which. Portuguese itself has several cases like that. For instance, manga means simultaneously sleeve, mango, and (fire) hose. Why shouldn't they be written manga, mânga, mãga?

The whole thing is so irrelevant as to be absurd. Can't they realize that a "perfect spelling" throughout is Mission Impossible? All languages make little adjustments now and then, not all necessarily logical. We call whiskey the barley drink the Scots call whisky yet English spell gaol (from the French geoele or gayole) and pronounce it jail, like we do and spell.

IT'S ALL GREEK [PLURAL] TO US

Surprisingly for a nation that came to mean Empire at all levels, the English and their American heirs are paranoid in their respect for original spellings of words. If the ancient Greeks said criterion and phenomenon in the singular but criteria and phenomena in the plural, we try meekly to follow. However, most people know practically nothing of Greek plurals. In the end criteria and phenomena become singular/plural, just as the Latin datum, plural data, is now mostly standard as data, singular and plural.

Most of us think that the accents that bedevil the poor Brazilian, French, Spaniard, Italian students are mere decorations, void of meaning. Years back, Chrysler marketed a low cost car called Volare (to fly) as a tribute to Domenico Modugno's song. It couldn't resist the temptation of embellishing it with an accent. So it became Volaré, which means "I will fly." It could be worse if it were Spanish: volar' means "I shall blow it up." And all that happened under the sharp eyes of Chrysler's chairman Lee Iacocca, who should have known better. But could he? After all, isn't the guy now being touted nationwide as "Eye-ah-cock-a?" Does it make him sound more...Anglo-Saxon?

Worse than that is the Brazilians' decision, against all odds, against all reason, against all history, that Singapura should be spelled with a C, like a gaiato (funster) said on TV. Perhaps the same chum who said "Chove a píncaros no Maracanã" (It's raining mountain peaks in Rio's giant soccer stadium). This show of cretinism elicits not a peep from the well known and widely respected Brazilian philologist Antonio Houaiss. Yet he is 100% right when he says "Learn it!" to people who complain "how will I know to pronounce a word without a trema or an accent?"

Hoauiss should urge them to master how the English word mister differ in pronunciation. Sometimes it is a primer, an elementary textbook; others it is primer, a paint undercoat and/or an explosive detonator. Perhaps we should do to grammarians what Shakespeare suggested we do with lawyers: "Primero, vamos a volarlos a todos!"

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