Post #44: Linguistic Challenges

First of all, Portuguese is a beautiful language! A romance language with many lexical and grammatical features in common with Spanish, Portuguese has its twists. Spoken on several continents - Africa, Europe, South America, and Asia - it has its variations too. I took four months of conversion Portuguese from Spanish before coming to Brazil, and the language comes in very handy. Almost no one in the service sector is capable of speaking English, and, even in academic and government circles, it can be difficult to find interlocutors with the comfort and confidence to conduct a meeting in English. So, I am getting quite a lot of practice.

One funny aspect of Brazilian Portuguese is the word meia. It can mean middle or half, but it is also used for numbers here in Brazil, something my Portuguese for diplomats course did not teach or use. We have lots of these homophones in English but I am reminded at how difficult it can be for a non-native speaker to parse and interpret when it seems out of context. Here, meia can mean

- half

- half past as in time

- sock

- and the number 6

It is this last meaning that has thrown me for a trip. Almost no one uses "seis" to indicate the number 6 in spoken Portuguese. I have been confused on the phone, at the bank, and in the store. Meia, coming from a half dozen, is the short-cut normal way of saying six. 

The question prevails: If everyone uses meia to mean six, why didn't we ever talk about this in class? Seriously... those brain synapses are keeping fresh because I'm still learning.