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Nobody frowns in Portuguese

My Brazilian informant tells me there is no word in Portuguese for "frown". I'm astonished -- it's part of the basic conceptual inventory of opposites of any English-speaking three-year-old (big/little, black/white, yummy/yucky, smile/frown, etc.). I'd have assumed it was a human universal. Not at all, says my amiga carioca.

My dictionary says that a frown in Portuguese is um cenho, but my informant says nobody uses that word and when she mimes it she does more of a grimace than a simple frown anyway.

The Corpus Lingüisticus Googleeënsis confirms her report. Google searches of Portuguese pages turn up a mere 1210 hits for cenho while sorriso (smile) occurs 140,000 times. That's a smile/frown ratio of 116 : 1. The same ratio for English is just 15 : 1. I found similar results for laugh/frown ratios. I'm no statistician but the difference looks significant to me. (Curiously, in Spanish there are more frowns even than in English: the sonrisa/ceño ratio in Spanish is a mere 9 : 1.)

I jokingly suggested to my Brazilian friend that there's no word for frown because everybody in Brazil is too happy. She said she thought it must be true. I want a National Institute of Mental Health grant to study the matter further.

I would enjoy the opportunity to be a co-researcher!

For what it's worth, my French, Spanish and Portuguese dictionaries (meagre as they are) do not list a single simple word for frown. They're mostly variations of "knit the eyebrow" -- in French, "froncer les sourcils", Spanish is "fruncir el ceño" and Portuguese has two: "franzir as sobrancelhas" and "amarrar a cara".

Thanks, JR. But Spanish ceño doesn't mean "eyebrow"; eyebrow is ceja. Dunno about French.

You're right, though, that it's more likely that Portuguese uses a phrase of some kind to cover the phenomenon of frowning than the picturesque theory that no one in Brazil ever frowns.

P.S. Can someone out there who knows Latin properly decline "Corpus Lingüisticus Googleëensis" for me? It's a tool I use all the time and as a language geek I'd like to know how to say it right.

"cara feia" or "cara triste" is the opposite of "sorriso," say the natives. Sometimes a "careta" (grimace):

contração involuntária ou proposital dos músculos da face, por alguma dor (física ou moral), ou por um gracejo, brincadeira

The Latin phrase is all nominative: The Google (attributive) Linguistic Corpus.

Nice new look!

Oh, and before the Mermaid scolds you, it's português (com chapeu). :-( (cara feia)

Iggy, thanks for the correction about my spelling of português. It wasn't a problem with my knowledge of Portuguese orthography, meagre as it is, but with my recollection of the bleeping French names of the accents in HTML ampersand escapes. Why couldn't they have been as anglocentric as the rest of HTML and called it "&ehat;"? :-)

Yes, but he wants to know how to say it. (I don't know if this comments section enables HTML, so if the itals are stripped, that's "*say* it.") After the "Corpus" (which I presume you can handle) it's ling-GWIS-ticus google-ee-EN-sis; the "ë" mandates an extra syllable between the "google" and the "ensis."

Ah, HTML is good to go!

Goddammit, your fancy new comments section doesn't remember my info! Ahem. Anyway, as I was going to say: on the subject of word/thing connections differing between languages, I just discovered Russian has a perfectly normal word, plyusna, for the part of the foot between the back (with the ankle) and the front (with the toes). The only translation in "English" is "metatarsal," a word known only to doctors and dictionaries. I imagine Russians find our lack of a normal word for this thing-in-the-world as odd as you find the lack of a Brazilian "frown."

Sorry, Hat, my comments doohick is home-grown and so far cookie-free. I hope to add a "remember my info" feature in the distant future. But a preview feature would probably be even more useful.

Actually, as far as I know I made up the phrase Corpus Lingüisticus Googleënsis myself and I can pronounce it just fine (since it's in a dead language and who's gonna correct me anyway?) What I wanted to know was whether my whimsically concocted endings were consistent with regard to case, gender, number etc. It sounds like I stumbled into a correctly declined nominative masculine singular which is pretty remarkable since the only Latin I know is reverse-engineered from Spanish and a subconscious absorption of a few phrases like "Encyclopedia Brittanica" or what have you.

In Gujarati and modern Sanskrit-derived Indian languages there is no distinction in common speech between "foot" and "leg" -- both are pag (that a is a schwa). Such conflations and sitinctions are common. I'm nevertheless surprised when I run into new ones.

Howard Rheingold wrote a book They Have a Word For It about words other languages have which English doesn't; perhaps he should write a sequel They Don't Have a Word For It.

Sitinctions? Distinctions.

Glad to be of service. The Mermaid is a stern mistress and is very conservative when it comes to diacriticals such as &aroundbend; Hey, join me in a daily exercise in vocabulary-building.

For the Latin phrase, I would've written Corpus linguisticum googlense. Corpus is a third declension neuter noun, so the adjectives linguisticus and googlensis would take neuter endings also. I'm not sure why you have an umlaut over the u in linguisticus or over the middle of three 'e's. Why all the 'e's?

Jim, the umlauts over the u and the e are not to change their values as in German ü or ö, but to keep them from forming diphthongs or digraphs with the letters next to them. That's like Spanish lingüística, French Anaïs and even English "reënter" in some old-fashioned stylebooks (I think the New Yorker still does that). Whether Latin ever used that trick I don't know; as I say I was manufacturing my Latin from thin air.

I think I typed one e too many and should have stopped at "Googleënsis", but I did want at least two e's because I'd like for it to have four syllables (goo-gl-EN-sis).

Thanks for stepping forward as apparently the one Latin scholar in these parts who knows his vidi from his vici.

I think it was indeed one e too many... in my head I pronounced it as goo-gl-ee-EN-sis.

Prentiss, it's just that I've never seen umlauts over vowels in Latin. I'm familiar with their use in Spanish, English, and Germanic languages. Linguisticum would be four syllables. Googlensis, I suppose would be three as you suggest. The problem being that the word looks weird in Latin already, which may be what you're going for. If you're going for gu-g@l-i-en-sis, I would write it gugeliensis, or gu-gli-en-sis, then gugliensis. (You could replace the -u- with -o-, but -oo- looks like a Greek word with both 'o's pronounced. In the end it's up to you. Just for concord's sake, make sure you have linguisticum and X-ense

Hi Prentiss

The translation for frown, like all things, depends on the context, but as Iggy pointed out "fazer careta", "fazer muxoxo" (maybe, not sure) ou "franzir o cenho" are possible translations, the latter being the most gestual. "Torcer o nariz" is also a good one for frowning with the purpose of expressing disdain.
And now that you mention it. You now one that is really hard to translate? To nod. In Portuguese it's "fez que sim com a cabeça" ou "assentiu". Either too descriptive or not gestual enough!

ME

Oddly enough, French also lacks a word for "shallow" as in shallow water. They have "superficiel" for the personality disorder meaning of the word, but for water the best they could come up with was "peu profond" (i.e. little deep).

how do u say.sexy in portugese

I believe that "sexy" in Portuguese is sexy.

The sonrisa/ceño ratio in Spanish is 33:1. In Google ceño is "ceno AND ceño". "+ceño" is what you want.

However nobody uses ceño, at least in Chile.