I'm watching a Brazilian TV show with Portuguese subtitles. That's
tough going with Wiktionary at hand, since I don't actually know
Portuguese.

One oddity I have noticed is the use of the singular with body parts
where I would expect a plural:

Mão na cabeça! -- Hands (hand) on your head!
Abre o olho! -- Open your eyes (eye)!
Tá achando que esse teu olho azul vai te salvar de alguma porra?
-- You think these blue eyes (this blue eye) of yours are gonna
save you from shit here?

Is this a general feature of Portuguese? Brazilian colloquial
register?

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

Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
> I'm watching a Brazilian TV show with Portuguese subtitles. That's
> tough going with Wiktionary at hand, since I don't actually know
> Portuguese.
>
> One oddity I have noticed is the use of the singular with body parts
> where I would expect a plural:
>
> Mão na cabeça! -- Hands (hand) on your head!
> Abre o olho! -- Open your eyes (eye)!
> Tá achando que esse teu olho azul vai te salvar de alguma porra?
> -- You think these blue eyes (this blue eye) of yours are gonna
> save you from shit here?
>
> Is this a general feature of Portuguese? Brazilian colloquial
> register?
>

As an unmarked usage, it’s colloquial brazilian. As nuance, it’s found
everywhere.
In either case, it’s not specific to body parts.
When it’s nuance… using the singular (in these examples) makes the sentence
refer to the entire class rather than the specific instances. It’s
redundant since (again in these cases) the plural would address all the
relevant instances of the class… maybe that’s why colloquial brazilian did
away with the plural altogether.

A separate phenomenon is the general loss of the plural marker in
brazilian, but that is not (yet) unmarked colloquial.

The concept of ‘on account of your (beautiful) blue eyes’ relates to the
fact that blue eyes are historically rare in our domain. It’s usually used
ironically. The addressee may or may not have blue eyes.

On 2023-11-13, Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>> Mão na cabeça! -- Hands (hand) on your head!
>> Abre o olho! -- Open your eyes (eye)!
>> Tá achando que esse teu olho azul vai te salvar de alguma porra?
>
> In either case, it’s not specific to body parts.
> When it’s nuance… using the singular (in these examples) makes the sentence
> refer to the entire class rather than the specific instances. It’s
> redundant since (again in these cases) the plural would address all the
> relevant instances of the class…

Can you give an example where there would be a clear distinction?

> A separate phenomenon is the general loss of the plural marker in
> brazilian, but that is not (yet) unmarked colloquial.

I was totally stumped by sentences like "Os cara querem que ..."
until it dawned on me that some plural markers are being elided.
Googling on the subject found some articles that confirm that there's
a trend to mark the plural only once in a noun phrase, typically
at the start. (This reminds me of the trend in German to mark the
genitive case only once in a noun phrase.)

There are also other instances of missing -s. "Vamo!" instead of
"vamos!" is common. And "mermo" instead of "mesmo". I don't know
what to make of this. It is reminiscent of the Spanish shift
-s > /h/ > -0, but I don't think that a general soundshift is
underway.

Also, Brazil is an enormous country and there are clearly different
varieties interacting. One character has traveled deep into Amazonia
("Manaus: 853 Km") and a local there uses second person verb forms!

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