Family Storybook: Bay What Now?

There are moments in life that get packaged into “A Tale” rather than just “a story”. You tell it practically the same way each time you share it, and you tend to share it a lot. Each new person you meet, they’re going to hear your Tales as part of the get-to-know-you process. One of the ones that we tell (ok, John tells) frequently is prompted by conversations about the difficulty of learning the Portuguese language.

In the very early days of our arrival, new friends introduced us to a local liquor – Licor Beirão, commonly referred to simply as “Beirão”. Commonly it is served on ice with a squeeze of lemon or, if you want to be all claaaaaassy, with a rub of lemon along the rim. As you may know, John doesn’t really drink much – he’s not a teetotaler, he just normally doesn’t like it. This often intrigues people enough that they want to get him to try all sorts of things, and it almost never goes anywhere. However, it turns out he kinda likes his Beirão! Which is a nice treat because sometimes he feels a little childish having a coke when the adults are having cocktails. There was only one problem with his new drink of choice: he can’t pronounce it to save his life.

If you’re one of our readers already here in Portugal, or if you’ve done a bit of language study in preparation, you may already see what the problem is. Most languages (or groups of closely-related languages, probably) have sounds that are unique to them. It’s obvious when you hear people talk about, for example, speaking Chinese; we’re told that slight differences in closely-related sounds can change a sentence from “please pass the salt” to “your mother makes her best money during Fleet Week.” Or whatever. This is actually true of a lot of languages, though, even if it doesn’t seem as exotic. Heck, they don’t make much use of the letters j, x, or z here, and when they encounter words from languages that use those letters it gets tricky. Maybe you’ve heard of the exotic Azores islands? That’s not how it’s spelled natively; try “Açores”. Anyway, on top of learning the vocabulary of a new language, we’re also having to learn the sometimes very subtle differences in how you intuit the sounds of some words.

In the case of John’s new happy-time juice, it all comes down to that “ão” sound. Most Americans begin by saying it like “ow, I hurt myself,” but that’s not right. We don’t really make this sound in English, but try to imagine making the sound in the back of your throat, combined with most of a glottal stop. (If you really want to take a crack at it, here’s a good video to help you.) Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a language lesson; the point is, the word “Beirão” has that sound in it. So, okay, John sounds like a tourist when he says it, what’s the big deal, right? If only.

Imagine you are a bartender at random-dot-tavern somewhere in America. A person comes in, walks up to the bar, pulls out an English phrasebook, studies it, and then says “may I pleez haf a Boodweezer?” Now, you don’t serve “Boodweezer” but you’re in a bar, you serve drinks, and a person has walked up to you and said this. Between the context clues (location, typical tasks etc…) and their half-assed pronunciation, you know what they want, right? (You may judge their choice if you’d like, that’s not the point of this story.) Well. We would be asked by a server, often in English but either way, if we would like something to drink. John would take a crack at it – “May I have a Beirao?”, or maybe even “quero um Beirao” or “gostaria de Beirao”. But, no matter the sentence he used, the server would like at him like a dog being shown a magic trick. They really really really want to understand you, but they just don’t. Gesturing at a menu, or interpretive dance, or John (increasingly flustered) trying to alternate his pronunciation, and they’d just stare. Again, this is the difference between “Bay-row” (with the “ow”-ouchie sound) vs. “Bey-rão” with the elusive nasal sound. Boodweezer. This happened a dozen times if it happened once. Eventually, they would say “oh! You mean <noise that sounds exactly like what John said, except probably not>!” They would then typically offer a brief tutorial on how to say it properly that did no good whatsoever before toddling off, chuckling, and preparing our drinks.

Lisa finally cracked the code, or at least cracked a work-around. She suggested that he include one more piece of context evidence: say “Licor Beirão” instead of just “Beirão” since that’s its full trademark. Sure enough, doing that seemed to make just enough of a correct sound that it smoothed over most problems. To this day, though, what baffles John is that the noise he was making, while he’d never try to claim was accurate, seemed like it was good enough when factoring in all of the context clues, and yet was practically incomprehensible to native Portuguese speakers. And, naturally, he’s traumatized by it enough that he dreads having to say any word with that sound in it… of which there are hundreds if not thousands. We’re both better at saying it than we used to be, but we’ll probably never not think about the chaos that may be about to unfurl along with a drink order.