"U passile ou nao?"
I heard this on my way back from the postoffice, carrying a package for Blake that had accidentally been sent to Australia on its way here. Makes me wonder where the other stuff I get months later has been.
Anway. The above is a wonderful mixture of Portuguese and Changana but speaks to one of the major problems that I'm confronted with every day. People here don't speak "Portuguese", but a Portuguese translation of their Changana, which becomes more grammatically similar to Portuguese the more education they receive. What makes this frustrating for a foreigner is that they haven't learned how to think in a different way, just use different words for the same thoughts. And so even if I spoke perfect Portuguese (kids can understand for the most part the WORDS I'm saying, but get caught up in the meaning), it wouldn't make sense 50% of the time. What worsens matters is that if I'm trying to explain something, I slip into English Portuguese - arranging a sentence as I would in English. I usually end up saying it again in a different order, more amenable to the verb-led, noun-dominated structure of Bantu languages. And then I have to watch out because my vocabulary is huge, due to all the Latin-English cognates. It's too easy to make up perfectly correct Portuguese that the students won't understand.
And then there's the problem of creep. Portuguese creeps into Changana and vice-versa. Words that the Changana people never had to have before the Portuguese arrived, use borrowed words: Xikolers (school = escola [Portuguese]); mapao (bread = pao); and also from English: wache (watch), xipun (spoon), mova (car), buku (book), viki (week). Asking Albertina today what she was doing (she was reading), she said "ni lera buku", or "I'm reading a book". Ler is Portuguese for "to read", so I asked if she knew the Changana, but she didn't. So included in this creep are basic words which are simply easier to say in Portuguese.
And it goes the opposite way, too. When someone wants to be expressive, they resort to their mother tongue. So the Portuguese here suffers a tremendous blow when dealing with colloquial conversation. A native Portuguese speaker would have a tough time deciphering some informal conversations here. So little by little, it seems that a convergence is taking place, whereby a creole may emerge in the cities that isn't one language or the other.
This could be stemmed by the introduction of local language education in the primary schools next year. If a student knows grammatical concepts in their own language, then they'll be able to obtain learning skills for mastering other languages. Or so is the hope.
So I owe an explanation of the opening phrase. "U" is Changana, the 2nd person singular conjugation of the state of being form which requires an object (in this case, the object would be understood as the affirmative statement), essentially, "You are", "You had", "You did", "You were", etc., depending on the verb accompanying it. n this case, "passile", which is the past tense of "ku passa" borrowed from the Portuguese "passar", "to pass". The conjunctival clause at the end "ou nao" is Portuguese for "or not". So this means "Did you pass or not?", but it takes two languages to understand that.
Really, it comes down to what's easier to say. Conjugating verbs in Changana is ridiculously easy compared with Portuguese, so verbs get stolen all the time, when they're shorter and easier to say. Conjunctions are also short and clear, so "but", "or", "and", "so", etc., are almost exclusively Portuguese.
What makes this phenomenon truly interesting is that many city speakers are becoming unable to communicate with country speakers as they have lost much of the basic words. So in the city, they aren't really speaking Changana anymore - and when speaking Portuguese, it's not really Portuguese either. El pa!
Peace
John
