1 sep 2012

'love actually' is in heavy rotation on hbo right now so i've seen it a couple times in the past week. it's one of those great ensemble movies that you can catch at any point and watch over & over. i have wondered if liam neeson, hugh grant, laura linney, colin firth, alan rickman, kiera knightly or any of the other overflowing abundance of talent saw each other more than once during the filming. well, i mean, unless they were in the same little cell of this many-celled production.

but, i digress. my point here is that portuguese sounds like an eastern-european language.

colin firth plays jamie, a lonely writer who composes his novel on a typewriter whilst sitting by a lake. a series of circumstances (as will happen in such a film as this) have landed him with a portuguese housekeeper, aurelia. aurelia doesn't speak english or french, jamie doesn't speak portuguese. their mute dance of love is quite predictable... however, they do it so well, it's human and compelling.

but, i digress. to someone who speaks neither, this woman's portuguese sounds more common to serbian than spanish. i would have pegged portuguese for a spanish-type language, due specifically to portugal's proximity to spain. in a brilliant bit of casting, the actress who plays aurelia is literally portuguese herself. she's small, dark, and i guess you could say that she looks spanish but she also resembles a gypsy. gypsies are basically hobos native to eastern europe (romania... right?), so perhaps some gypsies settled in portugal. i am going with this.


did you know that portuguese is the most spoken language in the southern hemisphere? this is according to wikipedia... which also states that portuguese is the second most spoken language in massachusetts. (really??) i would guess portuguese's prevalence in the southern hemisphere is due to the giantness of brazil, but there are also several countries in africa that were formerly portuguese colonies and where portuguese is the official language, and those are in the southern hemisphere, too.

it's sort of amazing to think a tiny country like portugal could hold so many other much larger countries under their rule. how would that work? i need to brush up a bit on colonialism.

in a bit of trivia, the kid from 'love actually' - you know, the adorable little blond pixie boy who learns to play drums in order to win the heart of his junior high beloved? that boy. he went on to become ferb in phineas and ferb, which in case you don't know is a cartoon. oh, no worries, he's simply voicing ferb. he didn't literally become a cartoon character. the point is, he plays drums.

drums. portuguese. if only i weren't so damn busy...