Brazil Language Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Brazil Language. Here they are! All 17 of them:

Spanish—how shall I say this?—is like Portuguese spoken with a speech impediment.
Sol Luckman (Snooze: A Story of Awakening)
Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.
John M. Keller (Abracadabrantesque)
Why does everyone call you Mexican?” he asks. My head jerks up. “Huh?” “I’m distracting you with an unrelated and potentially rude question. Aaron called you Mexican. So did they. But you don’t have an accent, and I knew a guy at school named Vasquez who was from Spain. So as the foreigner who hasn’t quite figured out your country, what tells them you’re Mexican?” I want to brush off the question. Really not the time. But that’s the point, isn’t it? I look down at my quavering hands, and when I squeeze my eyes shut, all I see is Predator, pulling the trigger. I can hear Gray’s and Predator’s footsteps. They’re far enough away and we’re well enough hidden that we’re safe here. For now. I glance at Max. “I don’t have an accent because my family has been here for three generations. My father’s family comes from Spain. My mother’s is from Cuba. That makes me Hispanic, and the presumption here—far enough from the border that there aren’t a lot of Latino immigrants—is that Hispanic equals Mexican.” “So Hispanic and Latino mean the same thing?” I shake my head. “Hispanic means you are descended from a country that speaks Spanish. Latino means you’re descended from a country in Latin America. Some are both, like Cuba. But if you come from Brazil, you’re Latino and not Hispanic, because the official language is Portuguese.” “And if it’s Spain, it’s Hispanic and not Latino. Excellent. My lesson in American terminology for the day.
Kelley Armstrong (The Masked Truth)
Could it be that we lose some of the visual functions that we inherited from our evolution as we learn to read? Or, at the very least, are these functions massively reorganized? This counterintuitive prediction is precisely what my colleagues and I tested in a series of experiments. To draw a complete map of the brain regions that are changed by literacy, we scanned illiterate adults in Portugal and Brazil, and we compared them to people from the same villages who had had the good fortune of learning to read in school, either as children or adults.41 Unsurprisingly perhaps, the results revealed that, with reading acquisition, an extensive map of areas had become responsive to written words (see figure 14 in the color insert). Flash a sentence, word by word, to an illiterate individual, and you will find that their brain does not respond much: activity spreads to early visual areas, but it stops there, because the letters cannot be recognized. Present the same sequence of written words to an adult who has learned to read, and a much more extended cortical circuit now lights up, in direct proportion to the person’s reading score. The areas activated include the letter box area, in the left occipitotemporal cortex, as well as all the classical language regions associated with language comprehension. Even the earliest visual areas increase their response: with reading acquisition, they seem to become attuned to the recognition of small print.42 The more fluent a person is, the more these regions are activated by written words, and the more they strengthen their links: as reading becomes increasingly automatic, the translation of letters into sounds speeds up.
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
You're a Parselmouth. Why didn't you tell us?" "I'm a what?" said Harry. "A Parselmouth!" said Ron. "You can talk to snakes!" "I know," said Harry. "I mean, that's only the second time I've ever done it. I accidentally set a boa constrictor on my cousin Dudley at the zoo once- long story- but it was telling me it had never seen Brazil and I sort of set it free without meaning to- that was before I knew I was a wizard-" "A boa constrictor told you it had never seen Brazil?" Ron repeated faintly. "So?" said Harry. "I bet loads of people here can do it." "Oh, no they can't," said Ron. "It's not a very common gift. Harry, this is bad." "What's bad?" said Harry, starting to feel quite angry. "What's wrong with everyone? Listen, if I hadn't told that snake not to attack Justin-" "Oh, that's what you said to it?" "What d'you mean? You were there- you heard me-" "I heard you speaking Parseltongue," said Ron. "Snake language. You could have been saying anything- no wonder Justin panicked, you sounded like you were egging the snake on or something- it was creepy, you know-" Harry gaped at him. "I spoke a different language? But- I didn't realize- how can I speak a language without knowing I can speak it?" Ron shook his head. Both he and Hermione were looking as though someone had died. Harry couldn't see what was so terrible. "D'you want to tell me what's wrong with stopping a massive snake biting off Justin's head?" he said. "What does it matter how I did it as long as Justin doesn't have to join the Headless Hunt?" "It matters," said Hermione, speaking at last in a hushed voice, "because being able to talk to snakes was what Salazar Slytherin was famous for. That's why the symbol of Slytherin House is a serpent." Harry's mouth fell open. "Exactly," said Ron. "And now the whole school's going to think you're his great-great-great-great-grandson or something..." "But I'm not," said Harry, with a panic he couldn't quite explain. "You'll find that hard to prove," said Hermione. "He lived about a thousand years ago; for all we know, you could be.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.” ― John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque
John M. Keller
Catholic colonizers showed greater tolerance of African cultural arts, especially the visual arts. In Jamaica, colonized by Anglicans, African cultural practices were not tolerated to the same degree that they were in Brazil. Even though the assumption behind the policy was "divide and rule," Catholic colonial governments in Brazil fostered brotherhoods segregated according to African ethnic affiliation. These islands of African space-where the bonds of oppression were temporarily loosened-were inhabited by people with similar languages and worldviews. Thus, they became areas where African language, customs, and ideas could legally be perpetuated.
Michael Barnett (Rastafari in the New Millennium: A Rastafari Reader)
Excluding the language barrier, the worst thing in Brazil is being a woman in a very male dominated, looks obsessed culture. I thought the United States was bad when it came to presenting girls with unrealistic body expectations. Brazil is so much worse. Now that I’m raising a daughter, I realize just how bad it is. All girls are called princessa and told not to cry because it’s ugly (Não chora! Vai ficar feia!). I could not find baby girls clothes in any other colour than pink. Toddlers go with their moms to the salons and get mani-pedis. On billboards, in magazines, everywhere you see advertisements for plastic surgery that you can pay for in 20 instalments! Brazil has more plastic surgeries per capita than any country in the world. It will be an uphill battle to raise a girl who does not think makeup is necessary for the gym.
Cyril Richert (My life abroad: A selection of expat stories)
I met Brazilian immigrants who tried to forget they were Brazilian. They got themselves American partners, American children, American jobs, and stored the Portuguese language in some hard-to-access place in their throats and only took pride in their origins when someone spoke praisingly of samba or capoeira (the latter too, in its origin, the martial art of the displaced, of the expatriated, of those torn from their homes). Or the Gracie brothers’ Brazilian jujitsu. Apart from these things, Brazil was crap. And getting worse and worse. Worse and worse. (Don’t you read the news? Did you see what the drug lords did in São Paulo?)
Adriana Lisboa (Crow Blue: A Novel)
World History 101 - The Actual History History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything. Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language. Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s. Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil. The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain. Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is. That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors. No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you? Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.
Abhijit Naskar (Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo)
Since the beginning of the negotiations, Castro’s instructions had been to be polite as long as the other side was polite, but not to allow insults: “Be very calm, laugh, and smile,” but if the others became offensive, then “put them in their place.” Aldana behaved accordingly. “Cuba would have no problem . . . announcing publicly that the negotiations had deadlocked,” he began. He then went where Ndalu had not dared to go, stressing “the ignorance, the racism and the contradictions” that characterized American society. He said that it was not surprising that in a country whose president mistook Brazil for Bolivia (as Reagan had done) and placed Jamaica in the Mediterranean (another Reagan lapse), the population would not know “what Angola is and what Namibia is.” This was not the kind of language that Crocker was used to hearing.
Piero Gleijeses (Piero Gleijeses' International History of the Cold War in Southern Africa, Omnibus E-Book: Includes Conflicting Missions and Visions of Freedom)
Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.
Srikanth Reddy (Facts for Visitors)
According to a Jesuit priest who passed through in 1643, New Amsterdam had speakers of no fewer than 18 different languages, and half of the population of New Netherland may have been non-Dutch.  Along with the previously mentioned Walloons, many residents were Germans and French Huguenots, and a fair number were Scandinavians.  Around the mid-17th century, the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam from Brazil, becoming the earliest Jews in any of the colonies that would go on to become states in the United States.  The 1639 map shows an encampment on Manhattan for black slaves, and, after mid-century, the numbers of slaves greatly increased as ships brought more to the colony directly from Africa.  New York would subsequently have the largest urban population of African-Americans in the northern English colonies.
Charles River Editors (Colonial New York City: The History of the City under British Control before the American Revolution)
Pirahãs eat fish, bananas, wild game, grubs, Brazil nuts, electric eels, otters, caimans, insects, rats — any sort of protein, oil, starch, sugar, or other foodstuff they can hunt, fish, or gather from their environment — though they avoid reptiles and amphibians, for the most part.
Daniel L. Everett (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle)
It is in Brasilia that I formed these cross-cultural relationships. Our energies together were striking, and the conversations we had were natural, innovative, and truly different than what I was used to in Canada. I developed a lot of patience by listening to people whose native language was not English, and I grew a profound sense of admiration for those who work so hard to learn English.
Kathleen Parisien (Citizen of the World : Part One: A Courageous Story of Volunteering Abroad, and Solo Backpack Travel in South America)
That’s the criticism: people turn to the occult because they either (a) don’t want to deal with the real horrors of the world and have the privilege of turning away from it, unlike the oppressed who have no choice but to face reality, or (b) are losers who can’t hack it in industrialized civilization and so choose to play Dungeons & Dragons instead. Western post-Enlightenment civilization defines itself as being rationalist and therefore against magic, but all cultures have magical practices, including our own. Christianity is full of magical practices, and the language of economics is permeated by spirits and invisible hands. Magic is everywhere; it’s just that the central power figures of a culture get to determine whose magic is considered “real” and whose is just considered embarrassing. Further, magic is not just a practice of the privileged; otherwise only the privileged would practice it, and that just isn’t the case, as you can see by visiting the fetish markets of Togo, the witch markets of Brazil, or any botanica in Los Angeles.
Amanda Yates Garcia (Initiated: Memoir of a Witch)
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Poul Duedahl