Regina's Rants

11 minutes’ read

I was a devoted student in the early days of my English language learning adventure.  So much so that, as a teen, I managed to gather a few like-minded colleagues and we embarked on a frenzy of extra-activity translations.  We translated words and expressions directly, searching in musty dictionaries and demanding attention from family and neighbours whom we believed, rightly or wrongly, knew the language better than we did.  Our translated expressions turned into incantations collected in a book of spells, expanded every so often with pride and delight at unveiling the mysteries of another language.

Eventually,  we took our prolific results to our English teacher.   She drew a red diagonal line over every page we had meticulously researched and written down, and immediately forbade us the use of dictionaries because,  “You don’t learn good English by translating idiomatic expressions or sayings literally.”

Naturally, the teacher’s attitude had the opposite effect: it assured us that we were on the right path, and instilled in us a fierceness none of our family and neighbours had seen.  We assigned ourselves extra translation homework.  We discovered and consulted dusty, yellowed pages of Portuguese-English dictionaries.  Just for good measure, some of us consulted French, Italian and Spanish tomes (to what end I know not).   With our private assignments done, the next day we dashed to school to share our discoveries and discuss what was right or wrong, and what could be improved.

Our conversations demonstrated our superb wisdom and erudition.   How do you say quebrar um galho in English?  Easy,  to break a branch.  We didn’t know, back then, that it was an idiom and it meant to help out, or make something easier for someone.  Yes, to break a branch, that was the right expression.  And how do you pronounce it?  It was anybody’s guess.

The English teacher insisted:  if we well-meaning ignorami did not take our little horses out of the rain (to give up), and stop translating to the foot of the letter (literally), she would take points out of our splendid exam results.  “You cannot learn English by direct translation.”  We ignorami did not wish to risk losing the eyes of our faces (very precious things), so we would swallow toads (do anything) to keep our high grades. Of course the teacher had the support of the school director, a man who inserted his foot in the jackfruit (ate too much), had the king in his belly (arrogant), and was a friend of the jaguar (false friend).   We had to peel a pineapple (solve a problem) and to travel in the mayonnaise (imagine another senseless situation to get out of this one).  We were killing dogs through screams (desperate).   And instead of putting our mouth to the trombone (making it public) and telling them all bread, bread, cheese, cheese (being direct),  in the end we sterilised the cat  (went away) with our deep knowledge weighing heavily in our minds, and everything ended in pizza (all the same).  We wanted more, so much more from those boring in galoshes (tedious, inconsiderate) teachers .  All before they made us see what is good for the cough (teach a lesson).

When a Mango is a Sleeve

Some years later, we were living in São Luis in the northeast of Brazil, and I was checking the corrections the English teacher had made in my daughter’s 4^th grade exam (old habits die hard).   The question was, “What fruit do you like?”, a tame enough question when someone is learning a new language.  The answer my daughter wrote was, “I like mango.”  The teacher had used her red pen to cross out the word mango and  write on the margin, “sleeve”.  What to do?  Manga (the fruit) and manga (the sleeve) are written the same way in Portuguese.   The poor teacher had got confused.  It happens to all of us. 

So, when we went to our parent-teacher conference, we said, oh, by-the-way, purely in the altruistic interests of academic accuracy, sometimes a sleeve is not a mango.  Or vice-versa.  The teacher, incensed, pulled out a dictionary from the shelf, let it land on her desk with a thump, and nervously looked up manga in the Portuguese section.  Bingo!   She said, “A manga IS a sleeve!”  That was the first word in the dictionary entry, and, having made the same mistake several times in my much frittered youth, I asked her to read what came after that. 

“No!” she said, “This is the correct answer, a manga IS a sleeve.  And I’ll call the director here to tell you the same thing.”  Oh yes, that director friend of the jaguar, with the king in his belly, a foot in the jackfruit. 

Husband said, “But I’m English and I know the difference!” 

“You don’t know,” she said, “that a manga is indeed a sleeve, because you obviously don’t know Portuguese well enough.”  To judge by the way she looked at him, he was another ignoramus that should never have gotten out of the pit where ignorami prowl.  

We  didn’t want to kick the wood of the tent  (make a scene), as we knew that in the mouth of closed the fly does not get in (to avoid difficult situation).  Above all,  we didn’t want our daughter to pay the duck  (suffer the consequences).  But as a matter of principle, we did whisper, “Oh, do call the director.”  She relented.  Each monkey in his branch (do not interfere). In the end, we all agreed to let mangoes and sleeves lie in their proper places.

English as She is Spoke

Little did my Anglophile teen colleagues, my daughter’s 4^th grade teacher, and I, know that we all belonged to a scholastic tradition of sorts.  In 1855, author Pedro Carolino had his 100-page book The New Guide to Conversation in Portuguese and English published in Paris.  The book was based on a Portuguese-French phrasebook written by José da Fonseca, which probably explains why da Fonseca is the first author.  Carolino, who did all the work of translating word-by-word, some pages with three columns of Portuguese, English translation, and pronunciation, had no knowledge of English.

People did not take Carolino’s work seriously until 1882, when an abridged edition came out in London under the new title of English as She is Spoke.  It was all in English and did not have its equivalent expressions in Portuguese, but it became a source of mirth.  In the same year, there was an American edition, with an  introduction by the august author Mark Twain:

Many persons have believed that this book’s miraculous stupidities were studied and disingenuous;  but no one can read the volume carefully through and keep that opinion.  It was written in serious good faith and deep earnestness, by an honest and upright idiot who believed he knew something of the English language and could impart this knowledge to others. … there are other sentences, and paragraphs, which no mere pretended ignorance would ever achieve – nor yet even the most genuine and comprehensive ignorance, when unbacked by inspiration.

The abridged book has had at least 14 editions in several locations, according to the scholar George Monteiro:  Peking, London, New York, Boston, Detroit, and Ireland are some of them. Neither the book or the chapbook were published in Portugal or Brazil, which defeated the author’s dedication, “We expect then, who the little book … that may he worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly.”   

In 2002,  the Brazilian publisher Casa da Palavra launched the latest reprint of the original book to celebrate its 150^th anniversary of publication in Paris.  Casa da Palavra must be good with words, but their math is questionable:  it was launched three years before the anniversary, a case of it’s better to be premature than accurate. 

As I read English as She is Spoke, Carolino’s choice of subjects made me wonder what was in his mind at the time. Also, whether he had a mind at all.   I kept wishing he couldn’t have been that bad. (Yes, I knew first hand that my teen translations had been horrific.)  Even accounting for centuries of cultural disparity and language change, Carolino’s list of Useful Words amazed me. From now on, please add [sic] where necessary in the examples below:

Of the Man: The brains; the superior lip; the fat of the leg

Woman objects: The pump; the paint or disguise; the Skate

Eatings: Some wigs; a little mine; an amelet; vegetables boiled to a pap

Drinkings: Some paltry wine [No!]

Quadruped’s beasts: Shi Ass; Dragon

Fishes and Shell-fishes: A sorte of fish; muscles; wolf; torpedo

Games: Bar; gleek; carousal; pile; keel [Makes total sense!]

Ecclesiastical dignities: Incumbent; general of an order; penitentiary

Degrees: A harbinger; a parapet; a king a lieutenant

Chastisements: Bastinade; the dungeon; the iron collar; to decapitate; to empale; to strangle; to whip; the galleys; to stamp, to mark; the torture rack; to break upon; tho tear off the flesh; to draw to four horses [He seemed to know a lot about this.]

But Carolino instils kindness, too.  In Familiar Phrases he states, “One must never to laugh of the unhappies,” and “I am confused all yours civilities.”  I don’t know when I’d use “I have put my stockings outwards,” for if I had, I wouldn’t tell anyone, the same with “I have mind to vomit,” but I could use “If can’t to please at every one’s.”  I would definitely say “You mistake your self heavily” if people were so cruel as to “Take that boy and whip him to much.”

In Familiar dialogues, For to make a visit in the morning, we face “Adieu, my deer, I leave you.  If can to see you at six clock to the hotel from ***, we swill dine together.” And, on The weather, Carolinho seems to try an enlarged form of haiku:

We shall have a fine weather to day.

There is some foggy.

I fear of the thunderbolt.

The sun rise on.

The sun lie down.

It is light moon’s.

But letters were followed by  Anecdotes.   I leafed through nine pages of hard reading and interpreting.  As Chountis de Fabbri wrote,  the philosopher Friedrich Nietszche believed that “a book should demand effort, provoke resistance, and leave a mark.”  English as She is Spoke delivered all that Nietszche wished from a book.  So, to better savour its knowledge, I put the book aside, and finished reading it the next day.

I revived with Idiotisms  and Proverbs:   “With a tongue one go to Roma” – well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? Carolino carries on with  “Burn the politeness”;   “To fatten the foot;”  and  “To come back at their muttons”, whatever they mean.  They might have been Brazilian Portuguese expressions that existed in the 19^th century and fell into disuse, or expressions that existed only in French.  Or Carolino made it all up.

Regardless of what I believe about this book, Mark Twain had already chiselled the reputation of English as She is Spoke in stone:

Whatsoever is perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable:  nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow;  it is perfect, it must and will stand alone:  its immortality is secure.

With that unsurmountable quote, I ask you kindly,

Do you like the reading good deal too many which seem me?

That is to me a amusement.

              Let us take patience, still some o’clock…

And Finally…

Music of the Rant

Tico-Tico no Fubá (“Rufous-collared Sparrow in the Cornmeal”, I kid you not, oh these Brazilians!), written in 1917 by Zequinha de Abreu and Aloysio de Oliveira. Berlin Philharmoniker, conductor Daniel Baremboim.

If you wish to sharpen your English grammar and vocabulary please consult Fonseca, José da and Pedro Carolino.  English as She is Spoke. Originally published as O Novo Guia da Conversação em Portuguez e Inglez (The New Guide to Conversation in Portuguese and English).  Publ. Ex-classic Project, 2009.   Public domain. English as She is Spoke – Contents