Was watching a YouTube video on time series in ggplot2, moved on to another YouTube video on ggplot which turned out to be in Brazilian Portuguese. In which, it turns out -- I could probably have worked this out if I had thought about it - g is pronounced like the j of French je, and the final t is pronounced (roughly) tchi (because no word can end in a consonant in Br. Portuguese) - in other words, jéjéplotchi. Impossible not to love. When the dog barks, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad, I shall think of jéjéplotchi and not feel so bad.
No word ends in a consonant, and the prestige (Southern) variant also has no [ti], affricating it to [tʃi]. That’s why we end it with a sound like the consonant at the start of “cheese”, not as in “T-shirt”. So Eng. /'plɔt/ → Pt. /'plɔ.ti/ = ['plɔ.tʃɪ].
ReplyDeleteFor more fun Brazilian Portuguese pronunciations, the BBC's South American football correspondent describes how you too can pronounce 'Woodgate' like a Brazilian football commentator.
ReplyDelete(Not that native-English-speaking commentators are any better, of course.)