Word of the Day

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Passive voice in Portuguese

It is known that Portuguese does not allow the passive voice of verbs followed by prepositions, unlike English. Here is a sentence I found in the same book from which I extracted the piece about praguejar/plague: Desde o gole naquela taça de vinho, Jesus havia sido cuspido, cortado, humilhado e açoutado (my translation: since the sip from that wine glass, Jesus had been spat at, cut, humiliated and flogged). The Portuguese doesn't sound very idiomatic to me and looks like a direct and careless translation from the English sentence, which has spat at, a verb followed by a preposition. As you must cuspir em alguém (spit at someone) with a preposition after the verb, here is a way to save that sentence: Desde o gole naquela taça de vinho, cuspiram em Jesus e logo depois o cortaram, humilharam e açoutaram, in the active form.

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