So I have been watching _Olhar Indiscreto_ aka Lady Voyeur on Netflix
and I'm following along with Portuguese subtitles, never mind that
I don't actually know Portuguese.

The dialogue on this show, evidently a colloquial register of São
Paulo city speech, is remarkably different from what you would
expect from looking at a sketch of Portuguese grammar, or coming
from Spanish.

Most striking is the collapse of verbal inflection. The tense ~
aspect ~ mood system is alive and well, but the personal endings
are essentially down to 1sg, 3sg, and 3pl. The morphological 2nd
person is gone. "Tu/vós" have been completely replaced by "você(s)"
with 3rd person agreement. Actually, that's not quite true. "Tu"
occasionally shows up, but with a 3sg verb! The 2nd person imperative
also survives, at least in the singular, but that form is identical
to 3sg indicative. The 1pl has been replaced by "a gente" + 3sg,
apart from the occasional imperative.

This proliferation of 3sg verb forms has necessitated a resurgence
of subject pronouns. That extends to "eu". I don't know if that
is due to structural symmetry or additional phonetic pressure on
the distinction 1sg/3sg.

The pronominal system has been rototilled. Among the possessives,
"seu" has become associated with "você", effectively shifting to
2nd person function, and replaced by "dele"/"dela" in the 3rd person,
originally prepositional phrases that are placed after the noun.
The object pronouns "me", "te"(!), "se" are still around, but
bafflingly the 3rd person forms "o, a, lhe, ..." are completely
absent. Since I don't know Portuguese, I don't really know where
exactly to expect them, and so I'm still puzzling about what has
replaced them. I think I've seen "ela/ele" in the noun object spot.
Maybe some prepositional phrases fill in, too?

Now, this is just one data point and I don't know how representative
it is of wider changes in Portuguese, but this looks like major
language change in progress. Nor does the system look stable to
me. There's probably room for further verb syncretism, and a pronoun
system where 1st/2nd and 3rd person are syntactically different
looks like a setup for some sort of leveling.

It feels like a front row seat to the sort of changes that transformed
Middle English.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 21:15:03 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
<naddy@mips.inka.de> scribeva:

>So I have been watching _Olhar Indiscreto_ aka Lady Voyeur on Netflix
>and I'm following along with Portuguese subtitles, never mind that
>I don't actually know Portuguese.
>
>The dialogue on this show, evidently a colloquial register of São
>Paulo city speech, is remarkably different from what you would
>expect from looking at a sketch of Portuguese grammar, or coming
>from Spanish.

[snipped details]

Much of what you describe I think has been like that for ages, and is
also true of Portugal and of other parts of Brasil.

On Wednesday, June 28, 2023 at 5:30:07 PM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> So I have been watching _Olhar Indiscreto_ aka Lady Voyeur on Netflix
> and I'm following along with Portuguese subtitles, never mind that
> I don't actually know Portuguese.
>
> The dialogue on this show, evidently a colloquial register of São
> Paulo city speech, is remarkably different from what you would
> expect from looking at a sketch of Portuguese grammar, or coming
> from Spanish.
>
> Most striking is the collapse of verbal inflection. The tense ~
> aspect ~ mood system is alive and well, but the personal endings
> are essentially down to 1sg, 3sg, and 3pl. The morphological 2nd
> person is gone. "Tu/vós" have been completely replaced by "você(s)"
> with 3rd person agreement. Actually, that's not quite true. "Tu"
> occasionally shows up, but with a 3sg verb! The 2nd person imperative
> also survives, at least in the singular, but that form is identical
> to 3sg indicative. The 1pl has been replaced by "a gente" + 3sg,
> apart from the occasional imperative.
>
> This proliferation of 3sg verb forms has necessitated a resurgence
> of subject pronouns. That extends to "eu". I don't know if that
> is due to structural symmetry or additional phonetic pressure on
> the distinction 1sg/3sg.
>
> The pronominal system has been rototilled. Among the possessives,
> "seu" has become associated with "você", effectively shifting to
> 2nd person function, and replaced by "dele"/"dela" in the 3rd person,
> originally prepositional phrases that are placed after the noun.
> The object pronouns "me", "te"(!), "se" are still around, but
> bafflingly the 3rd person forms "o, a, lhe, ..." are completely
> absent. Since I don't know Portuguese, I don't really know where
> exactly to expect them, and so I'm still puzzling about what has
> replaced them. I think I've seen "ela/ele" in the noun object spot.
> Maybe some prepositional phrases fill in, too?
>
> Now, this is just one data point and I don't know how representative
> it is of wider changes in Portuguese, but this looks like major
> language change in progress. Nor does the system look stable to
> me. There's probably room for further verb syncretism, and a pronoun
> system where 1st/2nd and 3rd person are syntactically different
> looks like a setup for some sort of leveling.
>
> It feels like a front row seat to the sort of changes that transformed
> Middle English.

Are the subtitles in Standard Brasilian (or Standard Iberian), or do
they too reflect these changes?

On 2023-06-29, Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:

> Are the subtitles in Standard Brasilian (or Standard Iberian), or do
> they too reflect these changes?

My comments are based on the subtitles. Those seem to match the
spoken dialogue, but my ability to segment spoken Portuguese is
poor.

The subtitles also include other colloquialisms: The preposition
"para" is universally reduced to "pra", and finite forms of "estar"
typically lose the first syllable: estou > tô, está > tá, etc.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

On 29/06/2023 9:15 a.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> So I have been watching _Olhar Indiscreto_ aka Lady Voyeur on Netflix
> and I'm following along with Portuguese subtitles, never mind that
> I don't actually know Portuguese.
>
> The dialogue on this show, evidently a colloquial register of São
> Paulo city speech, is remarkably different from what you would
> expect from looking at a sketch of Portuguese grammar, or coming
> from Spanish.
>
> Most striking is the collapse of verbal inflection. The tense ~
> aspect ~ mood system is alive and well, but the personal endings
> are essentially down to 1sg, 3sg, and 3pl. The morphological 2nd
> person is gone. "Tu/vós" have been completely replaced by "você(s)"
> with 3rd person agreement. Actually, that's not quite true. "Tu"
> occasionally shows up, but with a 3sg verb! The 2nd person imperative
> also survives, at least in the singular, but that form is identical
> to 3sg indicative. The 1pl has been replaced by "a gente" + 3sg,
> apart from the occasional imperative.
>
> This proliferation of 3sg verb forms has necessitated a resurgence
> of subject pronouns. That extends to "eu". I don't know if that
> is due to structural symmetry or additional phonetic pressure on
> the distinction 1sg/3sg.
>
> The pronominal system has been rototilled. Among the possessives,
> "seu" has become associated with "você", effectively shifting to
> 2nd person function, and replaced by "dele"/"dela" in the 3rd person,
> originally prepositional phrases that are placed after the noun.
> The object pronouns "me", "te"(!), "se" are still around, but
> bafflingly the 3rd person forms "o, a, lhe, ..." are completely
> absent. Since I don't know Portuguese, I don't really know where
> exactly to expect them, and so I'm still puzzling about what has
> replaced them. I think I've seen "ela/ele" in the noun object spot.
> Maybe some prepositional phrases fill in, too?
>
> Now, this is just one data point and I don't know how representative
> it is of wider changes in Portuguese, but this looks like major
> language change in progress. Nor does the system look stable to
> me. There's probably room for further verb syncretism, and a pronoun
> system where 1st/2nd and 3rd person are syntactically different
> looks like a setup for some sort of leveling.
>
> It feels like a front row seat to the sort of changes that transformed
> Middle English.

Both Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and Middle English were at one time
proposed as possible "creoles" or "semi-creoles" on the basis of such
changes.

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 17:10:20 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
<naddy@mips.inka.de> scribeva:

>On 2023-06-29, Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> Are the subtitles in Standard Brasilian (or Standard Iberian), or do
>> they too reflect these changes?
>
>My comments are based on the subtitles. Those seem to match the
>spoken dialogue, but my ability to segment spoken Portuguese is
>poor.
>
>The subtitles also include other colloquialisms: The preposition
>"para" is universally reduced to "pra",

That's normal everywhere (also in Portugal), and has been for ages,
Literally ages, probably. In Portugal also 'para o' => pró".
Also writing such things is less common.

>and finite forms of "estar"
>typically lose the first syllable: estou > tô, está > tá, etc.

See above.
--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com

On 2023-06-29, Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

> Both Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and Middle English were at one time
> proposed as possible "creoles" or "semi-creoles" on the basis of such
> changes.

Certainly not in the sense of "nativization of a pidgin".

When you compare English and German, the first thing you notice is
the High German consonant shift. The second observation is that
German has retained considerable inflection, whereas English has
mostly lost it. This despite a common starting point and a parallel
reduction of unstressed vowels in final syllables that left late
Old English and contemporary Old>Middle High German with similar
inflections, still largely conserved into Modern German. So what
pushed English over the edge?

I don't think it can be pinned on a single reason.

(1) Old English already displayed slightly more syncretism than
OHG. In the OE verbal system, the 1./2./3. person already shared
the same ending in the plural. If you look at the strong adjective
declension, OE lacks the nominative singular masculine marker -r
that German inherited from Proto-Germanic *-z. German also innovated
a nominative singular neuter marker *-t > -ȥ > -s, apparently by
extracting and reinterpreting the stem-final consonant of neuter
pronouns (it, what, that; es, was, das). So the strong adjective
declension had a few more distinctions in OHG.

(2) In a crucial sound shift, Middle English suffered the loss of
final -n, i.e., -en > -e. Presumably by syllabic n to schwa,
[n̩] > [ə] (cf. German dialects). This change didn't run to
completion, but it led to a confusion of -e and -en across the
inflectional paradigms. For instance, the -en of "children" and
"brethren" does not derive from Old English and appears to be the
result of some generalization or hypercorrection of -en for plurals.
Some strong participles lost -en (sing, sang, sung), some retained
it (hide, hid, hidden). The endings -e and -en carried a large
functional load and together with the eventual loss of -e, this
wiped out much of the inflectional landscape.

(3) Language contact. Specifically by way of the Danish settlers'
language shift from Old Norse to English. At the lexical level it
is clear that English was strongly influenced by Old Norse, extending
as far as the borrowing of the pronoun they/them/their. It stands
to reason that there must have been grammatical influence as well,
but demonstrating this in detail has proved elusive despite a century
of efforts. Vagueries like "changes spreading from the North" are
suggestive, but hardly conclusive. Don Ringe: "The discussion of
these problems will probably go on forever, and given the limited
facts at our disposal, it should."

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de