Brazil's new interim president, Michel Temer. Photo: Telam. Chaos in Brazil. The country's president of six years, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached by congress on corruption charges last week - specifically, that she overstepped her bounds in the budgeting process. But the country's new interim leader, ex-VP and former Rousseff ally turned foe Michel Temer, is even more deeply embroiled in corruption than Rousseff, as are the many congressional representatives that made the controversial vote (one who even did so praising the country's 1960s era dictatorship). Or, as a friend of mine from Brazil put it, "This place is like a season of Game of Thrones and where Westeros is led by Frank Underwood."
But amidst the tumult, people paying close attention to the issue were treated to a mildly goofy incident, also serving as a reminder of the how weirdly similar-yet-not Portuguese is to Spanish. On the day Temer took over, he received a phone call, which he was told was from the president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri. Temer, presumably much less adept at humor than he is at stabbing his allies in the back, thought it was genuine. He also used it as a way to show off his halfway-decent skills at speaking Spanish. But it turns out those skills weren't enough. First of all, Temer didn't quite catch what the caller on the other end of the line was asking him - after asking him how his day was going, Temer responds that he wants to visit Macri in Argentina. But more importantly, Temer had no idea that caller on the other end of the line was in fact not Macri, but one of a pair of crafty radio hosts from Argentina, unhappy with the political situation in both their own country and in Brazil, who had decided to prank call him live on air. How did this happen? Chalk it up to the weird mix of Spanish and Portuguese that speakers of these two language use to communicate with each other, dubbed "Portañol" (a combination of "Portuguese" and "Español", the Spanish word for "Spanish"). Though speakers of either of these languages can understand basic sentences when they speak among themselves, communications break down when they begin to have elaborate, slang-laden, fast paced conversations. And what also gets lost is the nuance of the particular way each person has of speaking their own language. Case in point: to a native Spanish speaker, the voice of the radio host wouldn't sound at all like Macri's distinctive, medium-to-high pitched intonation in Spanish. But to Temer, happy simply to be simply communicating in "Portañol", that nuance was lost, and the voice of a morning shock-jock chatting him up could easily be confused with a presidential phone call. But this incident doesn't appear to have hampered relations between Temer and the real president Macri, who himself phoned Temer soon after and has been one of the few world leaders to openly show support for Temer, his ideological ally. After all, crafty political gamesmanship is something that all world leaders are happy to engage in, even if they don't speak Portañol. |
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