Domo Obrigado, Rio. Image: Reuters/Yahoo www.rappler.com/technology/social-media/143810-viral-rio-2016-closing-shinzo-abe-super-marioThe 2016 Olympics wrapped last weekend, and of course, the show couldn’t be over without first shooting off a whole hell of a lot of fireworks and getting a lot of mileage out of that massive video display that had been installed on the floor of the Maracaná Stadium.
As is tradition at the Olympics, the closing also paid a hefty tribute to the next host city, Tokyo. Tokyo’s new mayor (technically a governor) Yuriko Koike, the city’s first female leader, was on stage along with Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes. But Koike wasn’t the highest ranking Japanese politician to attend the event – that honor went to prime minister Shinzo Abe, who made his entrance out of a giant green pipe in the center of the stadium, dressed as Mario from the Super Mario Brothers. But instead of bursting in with a chipper “It’s-a-me, Shinzo!”, Abe looked remarkably underwhelmed as he entered, almost saddened, with a look on his face that seemed to say that the only reason he had bothered with the pipe and Mario getup was to rack up shares on social media (by the way, mission accomplished). Perhaps he would have felt a bit peppier if he had grabbed a giant red mushroom before taking the stage. But for language nerds like myself, the highlight of the whole ordeal was right before Abe’s Mario moment, when the massive Maracaná display lit up with a message thanking its attendees. But in honor of both Rio and Tokyo, that message was put into both Portuguese and Japanese: “Obrigado”, “Arigato”. And in doing so, it perhaps prompted viewers to ask a question that has long perplexed many Japano-Brazilian polyglots: does the word “arigato” derive from “obrigado”? The short answer is that no, it doesn't. Though this theory has been bandied about by many would-be linguistic historians, it has been dismissed pretty decisively: see this link, or this link if you’re not yet convinced. Nevertheless, the idea that “arigato” is some distant cousin of “obrigado” is not as far fetched as you might think. The connection between Portuguese and Japanese actually goes way back, long before Japan had become the land of Mario and Murakami, to the time when Portuguese explorers dropped anchor off the shores of Shogun-dominated Japan. Wikipedia has a long list of Japanese words stemming from Portuguese; particularly notable are words like “irmao”, which means simply “brother” in Portuguese, but thanks to an influx of missionaries from Portugal, became “iruman” in Japanese, referring to a “missionary next in line to become a priest”. Presumably, Portuguese missionaries in Japan would call each other “irmao”; curious Japanese onlookers, who already had a word for “brother” but lacked a good word for a missionary in that very specific situation, eagerly adopted it into their own mother tongue. This is also good news for English speakers, since several of the words the Japanese adopted from Portuguese are directly related to their English equivalents. The word “alcohol”, for instance, is “alcool” in Portuguese and “arukoru” in Japanese. Nice to know for anyone looking to take in a swig of sake. The Olympics may be coming to a close, but anyone around the world curious about the origins of “arigato” and “obrigado” can be thankful to the event for shining a light on this frequently misunderstood linguistic coincidence. That's it for our special on language-related Olympics goings-on, but you can check out our earlier pieces, Part 1 on the history of "The Girl From Ipanema", and Part 2 on how bad behavior at the Olympics knows no language barrier. Check them out! 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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