The preterite or preterit ( / ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET -ər-it ; abbreviated PRET or PRT ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect (event viewed as a single whole; it is not to be confused with the similarly named perfect ) with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past . In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic , or (particularly in the Greek grammatical tradition) the aorist . When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes (but not always) expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt (compound past) even in perfective past meanings.
92-511: Preterite may be denoted by the glossing abbreviation PRET or PRT . The word derives from the Latin praeteritum (the perfective participle of praetereo ), meaning "passed by" or "past." In Latin , the perfect tense most commonly functions as the preterite , and refers to an action completed in the past. If the past action was not completed, one would use the imperfect. The perfect in Latin also functions in other circumstances as
184-400: A present perfect . Typical conjugation: Dūxī can be translated as (preterite) "I led", "I did lead", or (in the present perfect) "I have led." A pronoun subject is often omitted, and usually used for emphasis. In French , the preterite is known as le passé simple (the simple past). It is a past tense that indicates an action taken once in the past that was completed at some point in
276-551: A cultural presence of Portuguese speakers is also found around the world. Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal , and has kept some Celtic phonology. With approximately 236 million native speakers and 27 million second language speakers, Portuguese has approximately 263.8 million total speakers. It
368-442: A few remarkable cases, all three options exist for a single verb, although usage of each of these forms may vary. For perdere for example, the first person singular can occur as persi (irregular and most correct form), perdei or perdetti (compare to the past participle which can be perso (irregular, most correct) or perduto (regular)). In Portuguese , the preterite is the pretérito perfeito . The Portuguese preterite has
460-524: A form of Romance called Mozarabic which introduced a few hundred words from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Berber. Like other Neo-Latin and European languages, Portuguese has adopted a significant number of loanwords from Greek , mainly in technical and scientific terminology. These borrowings occurred via Latin, and later during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Portuguese evolved from
552-541: A language, though some may be distinguished in historical linguistics. They are not distinguished below, as any such usage tends to be idiosyncratic to the author. Lehmann (2004) recommends using privative ( PRV ) or aversive ( AVERS ) instead It is common to abbreviate grammatical morphemes but to translate lexical morphemes. However, kin relations commonly have no precise translation, and in such cases they are often glossed with anthropological abbreviations. Most of these are transparently derived from English; an exception
644-625: A large part of the diaspora is a part of the already-counted population of the Portuguese-speaking countries and territories, such as the high number of Brazilian and PALOP emigrant citizens in Portugal or the high number of Portuguese emigrant citizens in the PALOP and Brazil. The Portuguese language therefore serves more than 250 million people daily, who have direct or indirect legal, juridical and social contact with it, varying from
736-632: A native language by vast majorities due to their Portuguese colonial past or as a lingua franca in bordering and multilingual regions, such as on the Brazilian borders of Uruguay and Paraguay and in regions of Angola and Namibia. In many other countries, Portuguese is spoken by majorities as a second language. There remain communities of thousands of Portuguese (or Creole ) first language speakers in Goa , Sri Lanka , Kuala Lumpur , Daman and Diu , and other areas due to Portuguese colonization . In East Timor,
828-753: A repeated, continuous, or habitual past action ( mangiavo , "I was eating" or "I used to eat") and to the passato prossimo (literally "close past"), which refers to an action completed recently ( ho mangiato , "I have eaten"). In colloquial usage, the use of the passato remoto becomes more prevalent going from the North to the South of Italy. While Northern Italians and Sardinians use passato prossimo in any perfective situation, Southern Italians will use passato remoto even for recent events. Typical conjugations: *Many -ere verbs in Italian have stem alternations in
920-466: A result of either ablaut , a regular set of sound changes (to an interior vowel) in the conjugation of a strong verb , or because the verb conjugations are the remains of a more complex system of tenses in irregular verbs : With the exception of "to be" and auxiliary and modal verbs , interrogative and negative clauses do not use their main verbs' preterites; if their declarative or positive counterpart does not use any auxiliary or modal verb, then
1012-575: A standard discussion. Typical conjugations: In Romanian , the preterite is known as perfectul simplu (literally, the simple past or simple perfect). The preterite indicates a past accomplished action (translated: "verbed"); however, this tense is not frequent in the official language and not frequent in the standard speech (not used in Republic of Moldova and not used in the Romanian regions of Transylvania, Muntenia and Moldova). The general tendency
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#17327654073791104-437: A wizard') (Angola). From South America came batata (' potato '), from Taino ; ananás and abacaxi , from Tupi–Guarani naná and Tupi ibá cati , respectively (two species of pineapple ), and pipoca (' popcorn ') from Tupi and tucano (' toucan ') from Guarani tucan . Finally, it has received a steady influx of loanwords from other European languages, especially French and English . These are by far
1196-409: Is 'Z' for 'sister'. (In anthropological texts written in other languages, abbreviations from that language will typically be used, though sometimes the single-letter abbreviations of the basic terms listed below are seen.) A set of basic abbreviations is provided for nuclear kin terms (father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, son, daughter); additional terms may be used by some authors, but because
1288-647: Is also termed "the language of Camões", after Luís Vaz de Camões , one of the greatest literary figures in the Portuguese language and author of the Portuguese epic poem The Lusiads . In March 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language , an interactive museum about the Portuguese language, was founded in São Paulo , Brazil, the city with the greatest number of Portuguese language speakers in
1380-729: Is also the origin of the luso- prefix, seen in terms like " Lusophone ". Between AD 409 and AD 711, as the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe , the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Germanic peoples of the Migration Period . The occupiers, mainly Suebi , Visigoths and Buri who originally spoke Germanic languages , quickly adopted late Roman culture and the Vulgar Latin dialects of
1472-730: Is based on the Portuguese spoken in the area including and surrounding the cities of Coimbra and Lisbon , in central Portugal. Standard European Portuguese is also the preferred standard by the Portuguese-speaking African countries. As such, and despite the fact that its speakers are dispersed around the world, Portuguese has only two dialects used for learning: the European and the Brazilian. Some aspects and sounds found in many dialects of Brazil are exclusive to South America, and cannot be found in Europe. The same occur with
1564-412: Is considerably intelligible for lusophones, owing to their genealogical proximity and shared genealogical history as West Iberian ( Ibero-Romance languages ), historical contact between speakers and mutual influence, shared areal features as well as modern lexical, structural, and grammatical similarity (89%) between them. Portuñol /Portunhol, a form of code-switching , has a more lively use and
1656-508: Is either mandatory, or taught, in the schools of those South American countries. Although early in the 21st century, after Macau was returned to China and immigration of Brazilians of Japanese descent to Japan slowed down, the use of Portuguese was in decline in Asia , it is once again becoming a language of opportunity there, mostly because of increased diplomatic and financial ties with economically powerful Portuguese-speaking countries in
1748-677: Is grounded in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. Some authors use a lower-case n , for example n H for 'non-human'. Some sources are moving from classical lative ( LAT, -L ) terminology to 'directional' ( DIR ), with concommitant changes in the abbreviations. Other authors contrast -lative and -directive. Some sources use alternative abbreviations to distinguish e.g. nominalizer from nominalization , or shorter abbreviations for compounded glosses in synthetic morphemes than for independent glosses in agglutinative morphemes. These are seldom distinct morphosyntactic categories in
1840-536: Is only one past tense, which is formed using what was originally perfect. The dialect of German spoken in North America known as Pennsylvania German has also undergone this change with the exception of the verb to be, which still retains a simple past. The Alemannic German has also largely lost the preterite form. The only exception were the speakers of the isolated Highest Alemannic Saleytitsch dialect which disappeared around 1963/64. Conjugations with
1932-408: Is stated. This is opposed to the imperfect , which refers to any repeated, continuous, or habitual past action. Thus, "I ran five miles yesterday" would use the first-person preterite form of ran, corrí , whereas "I ran five miles every morning" would use the first-person imperfect form, corría . This distinction is actually one of perfective vs. imperfective aspect . The special spellings for
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#17327654073792024-512: Is to use the compound past ( perfectul compus ) to express a past action that is perceived as completed at the moment of speaking. Simple past is still actively used in current speech in the southwestern part of Romania, especially in Oltenia , but also in Banat , Crișana and Maramureș, mostly in rural areas. Usage of the preterite is very frequent in written narrative discourse, the simple past of
2116-721: Is understood by all. Almost 50% of the East Timorese are fluent in Portuguese. No data is available for Cape Verde, but almost all the population is bilingual, and the monolingual population speaks the Portuguese-based Cape Verdean Creole . Portuguese is mentioned in the Constitution of South Africa as one of the languages spoken by communities within the country for which the Pan South African Language Board
2208-636: Is usually listed as the fifth-most spoken native language , the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers and the second-most spoken Romance language in the world, surpassed only by Spanish . Being the most widely spoken language in South America and the most-spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere , it is also the second-most spoken language, after Spanish, in Latin America , one of
2300-708: The Economic Community of West African States , the Southern African Development Community and the European Union . According to The World Factbook ' s country population estimates for 2018, the population of each of the ten jurisdictions is as follows (by descending order): The combined population of the entire Lusophone area was estimated at 300 million in January 2022. This number does not include
2392-630: The Indo-European language family originating from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe . It is the official language of Angola , Brazil , Cape Verde , Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique , Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe , and has co-official language status in East Timor , Equatorial Guinea and Macau . Portuguese-speaking people or nations are known as Lusophone ( lusófono ). As the result of expansion during colonial times,
2484-806: The Red Cross (alongside English, German, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian), Amnesty International (alongside 32 other languages of which English is the most used, followed by Spanish, French, German, and Italian), and Médecins sans Frontières (used alongside English, Spanish, French and Arabic), in addition to being the official legal language in the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights , also in Community of Portuguese Language Countries , an international organization formed essentially by lusophone countries . Modern Standard European Portuguese ( português padrão or português continental )
2576-569: The Republic of the Congo , Senegal , Namibia , Eswatini , South Africa , Ivory Coast , and Mauritius . In 2017, a project was launched to introduce Portuguese as a school subject in Zimbabwe . Also, according to Portugal's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the language will be part of the school curriculum of a total of 32 countries by 2020. In such countries, Portuguese is spoken either as
2668-586: The West Iberian branch of the Romance languages , and it has special ties with the following members of this group: Portuguese and other Romance languages (namely French and Italian ) share considerable similarities in both vocabulary and grammar. Portuguese speakers will usually need some formal study before attaining strong comprehension in those Romance languages, and vice versa. However, Portuguese and Galician are fully mutually intelligible, and Spanish
2760-414: The infinitive , a stressed suffix that is different in each group of verbs, and the endings -i, -și, -∅, -răm, -răți, -ră , which are the same for all the verbs: In Italian , the preterite is called passato remoto (literally "remote past"). It is a past tense that indicates an action taken once and completed far in the past ( mangiai , "I ate"). This is opposed to the imperfetto tense, which refers to
2852-724: The pre-Roman inhabitants of Portugal , which included the Gallaeci , Lusitanians , Celtici and Cynetes . Most of these words derived from the Hispano-Celtic Gallaecian language of northwestern Iberia, and are very often shared with Galician since both languages have the same origin in the medieval language of Galician-Portuguese. A few of these words existed in Latin as loanwords from other Celtic sources, often Gaulish . Altogether these are over 3,000 words, verbs, toponymic names of towns, rivers, surnames, tools, lexicon linked to rural life and natural world. In
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2944-461: The "yo" form of the preterite are listed below (the accent mark goes over the 'e'); these are needed to keep their respective sounds. The endings for -er and -ir verbs are identical. The third person singular and plural forms of all verbs ending in -uir and -oír, as well as some verbs ending in -aer (excluding traer), end in -yó and -yeron, respectively; these are needed to keep their respective sounds. Examples of verbs that have anomalous stems in
3036-510: The -s- form. Most of the lexicon of Portuguese is derived, directly or through other Romance languages, from Latin. Nevertheless, because of its original Lusitanian and Celtic Gallaecian heritage, and the later participation of Portugal in the Age of Discovery , it has a relevant number of words from the ancient Hispano-Celtic group and adopted loanwords from other languages around the world. A number of Portuguese words can still be traced to
3128-583: The 10 most influential languages in the world. When the Romans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in 216 BC, they brought with them the Latin language , from which all Romance languages are descended. The language was spread by Roman soldiers, settlers, and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous Celtic civilizations established long before the Roman arrivals. For that reason,
3220-601: The 10 most spoken languages in Africa , and an official language of the European Union , Mercosul , the Organization of American States , the Economic Community of West African States , the African Union , and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries , an international organization made up of all of the world's officially Lusophone nations. In 1997, a comprehensive academic study ranked Portuguese as one of
3312-415: The 12th century onwards, and has since replaced it almost entirely. French simple past is mostly used in a narrative way to tell stories and describe successive actions. Novelists use it commonly: it brings more suspense, as the sentence can be short without any temporal reference needed. In oral language, the simple past is rarely used except while telling a story; therefore, it would be atypical to hear it in
3404-465: The 15th century, the Portuguese maritime explorations led to the introduction of many loanwords from Asian languages. For instance, catana (' cutlass ') from Japanese katana , chá ('tea') from Chinese chá , and canja ('chicken-soup, piece of cake') from Malay . From the 16th to the 19th centuries, because of the role of Portugal as intermediary in the Atlantic slave trade , and
3496-430: The 1st person singular, 3rd person singular and 3rd person plural. Some verbs (with d/t in their stem, including credere) also have endings -etti (1st person singular), -ette (3rd person singular), and -ettero (3rd person plural). Additionally, unlike in most languages, the third person plural is stressed on the irregular root. (Posero is stressed on the first syllable (POH-se-ro), not the second syllable (poh-SEH-ro).) In
3588-731: The 5th century, the Iberian Peninsula (the Roman Hispania ) was conquered by the Germanic , Suebi and Visigoths . As they adopted the Roman civilization and language, however, these people contributed with some 500 Germanic words to the lexicon. Many of these words are related to: The Germanic languages influence also exists in toponymic surnames and patronymic surnames borne by Visigoth sovereigns and their descendants, and it dwells on placenames such as Ermesinde , Esposende and Resende where sinde and sende are derived from
3680-440: The 9th and early 13th centuries, Portuguese acquired some 400 to 600 words from Arabic by influence of Moorish Iberia . They are often recognizable by the initial Arabic article a(l)- , and include common words such as aldeia ('village') from الضيعة aḍ-ḍayʿa , alface ('lettuce') from الخسة al-khassa , armazém ('warehouse') from المخزن al-makhzan , and azeite ('olive oil') from الزيت az-zayt . Starting in
3772-625: The 9th century until the 12th-century independence of the County of Portugal from the Kingdom of León , which had by then assumed reign over Galicia . In the first part of the Galician-Portuguese period (from the 12th to the 14th century), the language was increasingly used for documents and other written forms. For some time, it was the language of preference for lyric poetry in Christian Hispania , much as Occitan
Preterite - Misplaced Pages Continue
3864-589: The Americas are independent languages. Portuguese, like Catalan , preserves the stressed vowels of Vulgar Latin which became diphthongs in most other Romance languages; cf. Port., Cat., Sard. pedra ; Fr. pierre , Sp. piedra , It. pietra , Ro. piatră , from Lat. petra ("stone"); or Port. fogo , Cat. foc , Sard. fogu ; Sp. fuego , It. fuoco , Fr. feu , Ro. foc , from Lat. focus ("fire"). Another characteristic of early Portuguese
3956-536: The Germanic sinths ('military expedition') and in the case of Resende, the prefix re comes from Germanic reths ('council'). Other examples of Portuguese names, surnames and town names of Germanic toponymic origin include Henrique, Henriques , Vermoim, Mandim, Calquim, Baguim, Gemunde, Guetim, Sermonde and many more, are quite common mainly in the old Suebi and later Visigothic dominated regions, covering today's Northern half of Portugal and Galicia . Between
4048-619: The Leipzig Glossing rules, the most widely known standard. Synonymous glosses are listed as alternatives for reference purposes. In a few cases, long and short standard forms are listed, intended for texts where that gloss is rare or uncommon. Nonabbreviated English words used as glosses are not included in the list below. Caution is needed with short glosses like AT , BY , TO and UP , which could potentially be either abbreviations or (as in these cases) nonabbreviated English prepositions used as glosses. Transparent compounds of
4140-464: The Lusophone diaspora , estimated at 10 million people (including 4.5 million Portuguese, 3 million Brazilians, although it is hard to obtain official accurate numbers of diasporic Portuguese speakers because a significant portion of these citizens are naturalized citizens born outside of Lusophone territory or are children of immigrants, and may have only a basic command of the language. Additionally,
4232-686: The Portuguese acronym CPLP) consists of the nine independent countries that have Portuguese as an official language : Angola , Brazil , Cape Verde , East Timor , Equatorial Guinea , Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique , Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe . Equatorial Guinea made a formal application for full membership to the CPLP in June 2010, a status given only to states with Portuguese as an official language. Portuguese became its third official language (besides Spanish and French ) in 2011, and in July 2014,
4324-593: The Santomean, Mozambican, Bissau-Guinean, Angolan and Cape Verdean dialects, being exclusive to Africa. See Portuguese in Africa . Audio samples of some dialects and accents of Portuguese are available below. There are some differences between the areas but these are the best approximations possible. IPA transcriptions refer to the names in local pronunciation. Audio samples of some dialects and accents of Portuguese are available below. There are some differences between
4416-588: The areas but these are the best approximations possible. IPA transcriptions refer to the names in local pronunciation. Você , a pronoun meaning "you", is used for educated, formal, and colloquial respectful speech in most Portuguese-speaking regions. In a few Brazilian states such as Rio Grande do Sul , Pará, among others, você is virtually absent from the spoken language. Riograndense and European Portuguese normally distinguishes formal from informal speech by verbal conjugation. Informal speech employs tu followed by second person verbs, formal language retains
4508-436: The auxiliary verb did (the preterite of do ) is inserted and the main verb appears in its plain form, as an infinitive : For more details, see English verbs , Simple past , and Uses of English verb forms . German has a grammatical distinction between preterite ( Präteritum ) and perfect ( Perfekt ). (Older grammar books sometimes use Imperfekt instead of Präteritum , a borrowing from Latin terminology.) Originally
4600-477: The auxiliary verbs sein (to be), werden (to become), können (to be able), wollen (to want), haben (to have), the Präteritum is rarely used in the spoken language and informal writing, though the grammatical form is fundamental to producing the subjunctive and conditional forms, while compound verb conjugations are used instead. Yiddish has gone even further and has no preterite at all. Rather, there
4692-421: The concept of e.g. 'aunt' or 'cousin' may be overly general or may differ between communities, sequences of basic terms are often used for greater precision. There are two competing sets of conventions, of one-letter and two-letter abbreviations: These are concatenated, e.g. MFZS = MoFaSiSo 'mother's father's sister's son', yBWF = yBrWiFa 'younger brother's wife's father'. 'Elder/older' and 'younger' may affix
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#17327654073794784-605: The country was accepted as a member of the CPLP. Portuguese is also one of the official languages of the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China of Macau (alongside Chinese ) and of several international organizations, including Mercosul , the Organization of Ibero-American States , the Union of South American Nations , the Organization of American States , the African Union ,
4876-582: The distinction was as strong as in English: The Präteritum was the standard, most neutral form for past actions, and could also express an event in the remote past, contrasting with the Perfekt , which expressed an event that has consequences reaching into the present. In modern German, however, these tenses no longer reflect any distinction in aspect ("Es hat geregnet" means both rained/was raining), which parallels this lack of distinction in
4968-467: The end of the 20th century, being most frequent among youngsters, and a number of studies have also shown an increase in its use in a number of other Brazilian dialects. Differences between dialects are mostly of accent and vocabulary , but between the Brazilian dialects and other dialects, especially in their most colloquial forms, there can also be some grammatical differences. The Portuguese-based creoles spoken in various parts of Africa, Asia, and
5060-412: The entire string, e.g. o FaBrSo (an older cousin – specifically father's brother's son), MBD y (a younger cousin – specifically mother's brother's daughter) or a specific element, e.g. MFeZS 'mother's father's elder sister's son', HMeB 'husband's mother's elder brother'. 'Gen' indicates the generation relative to the ego, with ∅ for the same (zero) generation. E.g. Gen∅Ch (child of someone in
5152-701: The establishment of large Portuguese colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil, Portuguese acquired several words of African and Amerind origin, especially names for most of the animals and plants found in those territories. While those terms are mostly used in the former colonies, many became current in European Portuguese as well. From Kimbundu , for example, came kifumate > cafuné ('head caress') (Brazil), kusula > caçula ('youngest child') (Brazil), marimbondo ('tropical wasp') (Brazil), and kubungula > bungular ('to dance like
5244-643: The first Portuguese university in Lisbon (the Estudos Gerais , which later moved to Coimbra ) and decreed for Portuguese, then simply called the "common language", to be known as the Portuguese language and used officially. In the second period of Old Portuguese, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the Portuguese discoveries , the language was taken to many regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas . By
5336-501: The form of Latin during that time), which greatly enriched the lexicon. Most literate Portuguese speakers were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing, and eventually speech, in Portuguese. Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes once called Portuguese "the sweet and gracious language", while the Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac described it as a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela ("the last flower of Latium , naïve and beautiful"). Portuguese
5428-466: The formal você , followed by the third person conjugation. Conjugation of verbs in tu has three different forms in Brazil (verb "to see": tu viste? , in the traditional second person, tu viu? , in the third person, and tu visse? , in the innovative second person), the conjugation used in the Brazilian states of Pará, Santa Catarina and Maranhão being generally traditional second person,
5520-530: The formation of creole languages such as that called Kristang in many parts of Asia (from the word cristão , "Christian"). The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India , Sri Lanka , Malaysia , and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal. The end of the Old Portuguese period
5612-434: The glosses below, such as REMPST or REM.PST 'remote past', a compound of REM 'remote' and PST 'past', are not listed separately. Abbreviations beginning with N- (generalized glossing prefix for non- , in- , un- ) are not listed separately unless they have alternative forms that are included. For example, NPST non-past is not listed, as it is composable from N- non- + PST past . This convention
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#17327654073795704-406: The kind that is used in other Portuguese-speaking countries and learned in Brazilian schools. The predominance of Southeastern-based media products has established você as the pronoun of choice for the second person singular in both writing and multimedia communications. However, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the country's main cultural center, the usage of tu has been expanding ever since
5796-557: The language has kept a relevant substratum of much older, Atlantic European Megalithic Culture and Celtic culture , part of the Hispano-Celtic group of ancient languages. In Latin, the Portuguese language is known as lusitana or (latina) lusitanica , after the Lusitanians , a pre-Celtic tribe that lived in the territory of present-day Portugal and Spain that adopted the Latin language as Roman settlers moved in. This
5888-436: The medieval language spoken in the northwestern medieval Kingdom of Galicia , which the County of Portugal once formed part of. This variety has been retrospectively named Galician-Portuguese , Old Portuguese, or Old Galician by linguists. It is in Latin administrative documents of the 9th century that written Galician-Portuguese words and phrases are first recorded. This phase is known as Proto-Portuguese, which lasted from
5980-610: The mid-16th century, Portuguese had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. The Portuguese expanded across South America, across Africa to the Pacific Ocean, taking their language with them. Its spread was helped by mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people and by its association with Roman Catholic missionary efforts, which led to
6072-549: The minority Swiss Romansh language in many equivalent words such as maun ("hand"), bun ("good"), or chaun ("dog"). The Portuguese language is the only Romance language that preserves the clitic case mesoclisis : cf. dar-te-ei (I'll give thee), amar-te-ei (I'll love you), contactá-los-ei (I'll contact them). Like Galician , it also retains the Latin synthetic pluperfect tense: eu estivera (I had been), eu vivera (I had lived), vós vivêreis (you had lived). Romanian also has this tense, but uses
6164-1119: The most important languages when referring to loanwords. There are many examples such as: colchete / crochê ('bracket'/'crochet'), paletó ('jacket'), batom ('lipstick'), and filé / filete ('steak'/'slice'), rua ('street'), respectively, from French crochet , paletot , bâton , filet , rue ; and bife ('steak'), futebol , revólver , stock / estoque , folclore , from English "beef", "football", "revolver", "stock", "folklore." Examples from other European languages: macarrão ('pasta'), piloto ('pilot'), carroça ('carriage'), and barraca ('barrack'), from Italian maccherone , pilota , carrozza , and baracca ; melena ('hair lock'), fiambre ('wet-cured ham') (in Portugal, in contrast with presunto 'dry-cured ham' from Latin prae-exsuctus 'dehydrated') or ('canned ham') (in Brazil, in contrast with non-canned, wet-cured ( presunto cozido ) and dry-cured ( presunto cru )), or castelhano ('Castilian'), from Spanish melena ('mane'), fiambre and castellano. Portuguese belongs to
6256-462: The newspaper The Portugal News publishing data given from UNESCO, the highest potential for growth as an international language in southern Africa and South America . Portuguese is a globalized language spoken officially on five continents, and as a second language by millions worldwide. Since 1991, when Brazil signed into the economic community of Mercosul with other South American nations, namely Argentina , Uruguay and Paraguay , Portuguese
6348-610: The north of the country), Paraguay (10.7% or 636,000 people), Switzerland (550,000 in 2019, learning + mother tongue), Venezuela (554,000), and the United States (0.35% of the population or 1,228,126 speakers according to the 2007 American Community Survey ). In some parts of former Portuguese India , namely Goa and Daman and Diu , the language is still spoken by about 10,000 people. In 2014, an estimated 1,500 students were learning Portuguese in Goa. Approximately 2% of
6440-417: The number of Portuguese speakers is quickly increasing as Portuguese and Brazilian teachers are making great strides in teaching Portuguese in the schools all over the island. Additionally, there are many large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities all over the world. According to estimates by UNESCO , Portuguese is the fastest-growing European language after English and the language has, according to
6532-432: The only language used in any contact, to only education, contact with local or international administration, commerce and services or the simple sight of road signs, public information and advertising in Portuguese. Portuguese is a mandatory subject in the school curriculum in Uruguay . Other countries where Portuguese is commonly taught in schools or where it has been introduced as an option include Venezuela , Zambia ,
6624-399: The past (translated: "<verb>ed"). This is as opposed to the imperfect ( l'imparfait ), used in expressing repeated, continual, or habitual past actions (often corresponding to English's past continuous was/were <verb>ing or habitual used to <verb> ). In the spoken language, the compound tense known as le passé composé ("the compound past") began to compete with it from
6716-562: The past and is over; thus, In most other variants of Spanish, such as in the Americas and in the Canary Islands, this distinction has tended to fade, with the preterite being used even for actions in the immediate pre-present with continuing relevance. Typical conjugations: In Germanic languages , the term "preterite" is sometimes used for the past tense . The majority of English 's preterites (often called simple past or just past tense ) are formed by adding -ed or -d to
6808-464: The peninsula and over the next 300 years totally integrated into the local populations. Some Germanic words from that period are part of the Portuguese lexicon, together with place names, surnames, and first names. With the Umayyad conquest beginning in 711, Arabic became the administrative and common language in the conquered regions, but most of the remaining Christian population continued to speak
6900-640: The people of Macau, China are fluent speakers of Portuguese. Additionally, the language is being very actively studied in the Chinese school system right up to the doctorate level. The Kristang people in Malaysia speak Kristang , a Portuguese-Malay creole; however, the Portuguese language itself is not widely spoken in the country. The Community of Portuguese Language Countries (in Portuguese Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa , with
6992-463: The population of urban Angola speaks Portuguese natively, with approximately 85% fluent; these rates are lower in the countryside. Just over 50% (and rapidly increasing) of the population of Mozambique are native speakers of Portuguese, and 70% are fluent, according to the 2007 census. Portuguese is also spoken natively by 30% of the population in Guinea-Bissau, and a Portuguese-based creole
7084-540: The present, which has no separate verb form for the present progressive ("Es regnet": It rains, it is raining). The Präteritum now has the meaning of a narrative tense, i.e. a tense used primarily for describing connected past actions (e.g. as part of a story), and is used most often in formal writing and in literature. Typical conjugations with the word sein (be) are: For example, in spoken Upper German (in South Germany , Austria and Switzerland ), beyond
7176-438: The preterite include most verbs ending in -ducir as well as most verbs that are irregular in the "yo" form of the present tense (including traer). In most Iberian Mainland Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Mexican Spanish , there is still a strong distinction between the preterite and the present perfect . The preterite denotes an action that began and ended in the past, while the present perfect denotes an action that began in
7268-406: The preterite ( pretérito perfecto simple, or pretérito indefinido ) is a verb tense that indicates that an action taken once in the past was completed at a specific point in time in the past. (Traditional Spanish terminology calls all past tenses pretéritos , irrespective of whether they express completed or incomplete actions or events.) Usually, a definite start time or end time for the action
7360-613: The same form as the Spanish preterite, but the meaning is like the "composed past" of French and Italian in that, for example, corri means both "I ran" and "I have run." As in other Romance languages, it is opposed to the pretérito imperfeito ( imperfect ). Note that there does exist a pretérito perfeito composto ( present perfect ) but its meaning is not that of a perfect ; instead it shows an iterative aspect . For example, tenho corrido does not mean "I have run" but rather "I've been running." Typical conjugations: In Spanish ,
7452-444: The same generation, i.e. of a sibling or cousin); ♂Gen+1F (female one generation up, i.e. mother or aunt, of a male); Gen−2M (male two generations down, i.e. grandson or grandnephew). 'Cross' and 'parallel' indicate a change or lack of change in gender of siblings in the chain of relations. Parallel aunts and uncles are MoSi and FaBr; cross-aunts and uncles are FaSi and MoBr. Cross-cousins (+Cu) and parallel cousins (∥Cu) are children of
7544-401: The same. Parallel niece and nephew are children of a man's brother or woman's sister; cross-niece and nephew are the opposite. 'Elder' and 'younger' occurs before these markers: o∥Cu, y+Cu, and the gender of the ego comes at the very beginning, e.g. ♂o∥CuF, ♀y+CuM. Portuguese language Portuguese ( endonym : português or língua portuguesa ) is a Western Romance language of
7636-427: The speech verbs being generally after a dialogue line in narration: When used in everyday speech in standard Romanian, the preterite is used with the value of recent past, a recently completed action: The second person is often used in questions about finishing an action in progress that is supposed to be over, giving the question a more informal tone: The forms of the simple perfect are made of an unstressed stem of
7728-494: The verb's plain form ( bare infinitive ), sometimes with spelling modifications. This is the result of the conjugation system of weak verbs , already in the majority in Old English , being raised to paradigmatic status and even taking over earlier conjugations of some old strong verbs . As a result, all newly introduced verbs have the weak conjugation. Examples: A number of English verbs form their preterites by suppletion ,
7820-927: The word siin (be) were: The preterite was a common Semitic form, well attested in the Akkadian language , where the preterite almost always referred to the past and was often interchangeable with the perfect. In the course of time the preterite fell into disuse in all West Semitic languages , leaving traces such as the "imperfect with waw-consecutive " in Hebrew and "imperfect with lam" in Arabic. List of glossing abbreviations This article lists common abbreviations for grammatical terms that are used in linguistic interlinear glossing of oral languages in English. The list provides conventional glosses as established by standard inventories of glossing abbreviations such as
7912-515: The world. Portuguese, being a language spread on all continents, has official status in several international organizations. It is one of twenty official languages of the European Union , an official language of NATO, the Organization of American States (alongside Spanish, French and English), and one of eighteen official languages of the European Space Agency . Portuguese is a working language in nonprofit organisations such as
8004-533: The world. The museum is the first of its kind in the world. In 2015 the museum was partially destroyed in a fire, but restored and reopened in 2020. Portuguese is spoken by approximately 200 million people in South America, 30 million in Africa, 15 million in Europe, 5 million in North America and 0.33 million in Asia and Oceania. It is the native language of the vast majority of the people in Portugal, Brazil and São Tomé and Príncipe (95%). Around 75% of
8096-424: Was charged with promoting and ensuring respect. There are also significant Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities in many territories including Andorra (17.1%), Bermuda , Canada (400,275 people in the 2006 census), France (1,625,000 people), Japan (400,000 people), Jersey , Luxembourg (about 25% of the population as of 2021), Namibia (about 4–5% of the population, mainly refugees from Angola in
8188-537: Was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende , in 1516. The early times of Modern Portuguese, which spans the period from the 16th century to the present day, were characterized by an increase in the number of learned words borrowed from Classical Latin and Classical Greek because of the Renaissance (learned words borrowed from Latin also came from Renaissance Latin ,
8280-554: Was the language of the poetry of the troubadours in France. The Occitan digraphs lh and nh , used in its classical orthography, were adopted by the orthography of Portuguese , presumably by Gerald of Braga , a monk from Moissac , who became bishop of Braga in Portugal in 1047, playing a major role in modernizing written Portuguese using classical Occitan norms. Portugal became an independent kingdom in 1139, under King Afonso I of Portugal . In 1290, King Denis of Portugal created
8372-585: Was the loss of intervocalic l and n , sometimes followed by the merger of the two surrounding vowels, or by the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between them: cf. Lat. salire ("to exit"), tenere ("to have"), catena ("jail"), Port. sair , ter , cadeia . When the elided consonant was n , it often nasalized the preceding vowel: cf. Lat. manum ("hand"), ranam ("frog"), bonum ("good"), Old Portuguese mão , rãa , bõo (Portuguese: mão , rã , bom ). This process
8464-462: Was the source of most of the language's distinctive nasal diphthongs. In particular, the Latin endings -anem , -anum and -onem became -ão in most cases, cf. Lat. canis ("dog"), germanus ("brother"), ratio ("reason") with Modern Port. cão , irmão , razão , and their plurals -anes , -anos , -ones normally became -ães , -ãos , -ões , cf. cães , irmãos , razões . This also occurs in
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