Why do soy speak in the soap opera, in the male – 06/23/2023 – Thaís Nicoleti

Whoever said “soy” is correct, so there’s nothing to worry about. Anyone, however, who is watching the 9 o’clock soap opera on Rede Globo (“Terra e Paixão”), set on the soy farms of a large rural producer, will hear “soy” in the male version all the time.

In fact, this use is common among producers and their surroundings, which does have an explanation. It is because the entry of the term into Portuguese took place, as everything indicates, under the influence of the English “soya-bean”, whose literal translation is “feijão-soja”, this is a masculine term.

In an issue of Folha da Manhã, dated September 2, 1942, we find a text by Francisco Assis Iglezias entitled “Uma utopia de Henry Ford”, from which we extract this fragment: “Ford’s work, in this sense, is, of according to Mr. Engel’s comment, the soybean crop, commonly known here as soybean, is of Asian origin”. In that article, reference was made to the use of soy to produce plastic components for an automobile. We are particularly interested in the reference to the popular use of the term “soybean” mentioned by the author.

It does not seem difficult that this use derived the use of the masculine “soybean”, persistent until today in the areas of cultivation of the grain in Brazil. It should be noted, however, that this variant is local. In dictionaries, “soybean” is a feminine word, and “soybean”, naturally, is a masculine word.

Other Portuguese terms present hesitation regarding gender. This is the case of “usucapion”, which, although it appears more frequently as a feminine word, is also registered in the masculine form. The “Aulete” dictionary and the “Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language”, from the Brazilian Academy of Letters, are among the works that consider “usucapion” a noun of two genders. “Aluvião” also admits both genders, although, in the “Priberam” dictionary (from Portugal), it only has the registration of a feminine noun.

Alongside terms that admit both genders, there are those that have passed from one gender to another, such as “sea” and “planet”, which, probably under the influence of French (“la mer” and “la planète”), already were feminine terms, but are currently masculine in Portuguese. As can be seen, even among languages ​​derived from Latin, there is no gender uniformity.

Take the case of the word “cream”, masculine in Portuguese, but feminine in French (“la crème”). The famous (and tasty) French dessert, called “crème brûlée”, is, literally, a “burnt cream”. Since “crème” is a feminine term in French, “brûlée” follows the French concordance (the final “e” indicates feminine gender). When it comes to translation, editors of newspaper gastronomy sections struggle to decide what to do.

In Portuguese, “cream” is used in the masculine, but “brûlé” is never translated as “burned”… What to do, then? Using “creme” in Portuguese (masculine) and “brûlé” (in French, but in masculine, without the second “e”)? This solution apparently satisfies “logic”, but a Frenchman would certainly find “a creme brûlé” very strange. There are those who prefer to make the term “brulê” English, removing the circumflex accent from the “u” and passing it to the final “e”. Dictionaries do not bring the Portuguese form, which makes room for oscillation.

Other terms of French origin, such as “omelette” (fr.”omelette”), “fondue” (French), “scooter” (fr. “patinette”), “manete” (fr. “manette”) or “mascot” (fr. “mascotte”), suffer gender oscillation in Portuguese. “Omelete”, initially only feminine, is now treated in Brazil as a noun of two genders and, in Portugal, remains only feminine. “Fondue” retains the French spelling, but is accepted in Portuguese in both genres.

“Patinete” reached us as a feminine word, but in Brazil there was great insistence on its use as a masculine word in the press. Today, Brazilian dictionaries admit both genres; in Portugal, “scooter” is still a feminine word. “Manete”, in turn, is feminine in Portugal and oscillating in Brazil. “Mascot”, however, is always a feminine term – in French and in Portuguese (on both sides of the Atlantic).

It is not, however, only terms of French origin that present oscillations in terms of gender in Portuguese. An interesting case of gender oscillation is that of “sandwich”, which comes from the English “Sandwich”, the name of a city in England. The term arose under the influence of John Montagu (1718-1792), Earl of Sandwich, who, in order not to get up from a game table not even to eat meals, would have invented a way of eating by putting slices of meat between slices of bread or toast. In Brazil, “sanduíche” is a masculine word and, in Portugal, it is a feminine word (“uma sandwich” or “uma sandwich”).

When translating terms of Italian origin – which is particularly visible in the vocabulary of gastronomy – there is an oscillation in terms of number. In Italian, to make it plural, you don’t use the “s”, but the “e” or the “i”, therefore many of the pasta names that seem to us to be in the singular are, in origin, in the plural. This is the case of “penne”, plural of “penna” (which means “feather”, the feather of birds).

It is for these reasons and others that becoming Portuguese solves many problems. See the case of “spaghetti” (in Portuguese), singular masculine noun. Simple, isn’t it? If we want to write in Italian – to be more “fancy”? – we will have to face the problem of the plural. “Spaghetti”, in Italian, is the plural of “spaguetto”, which, in turn, is the diminutive of “spago”, which means “string”. A dish of “spaghetti”, therefore, is literally a dish of “little strings” – of pasta, of course. “Ravioli” (with an accent, in Portuguese) is singular, but “ravioli” (without an accent, in Italian) is the plural of “raviolo”.

The fact is that, with the ease of exchange between countries and cultures, languages ​​are in contact and influence each other. It is clear that the languages ​​of economically dominant countries exert a lot of influence over the others, as is the case of English. In cooking, the example of the English word “curry” is curious, whose origin is the Portuguese “caril”. In Portugal, recipes usually include “curry”, not “curry”. In Brazil, well, we prefer English.

In gastronomy, French and Italian still exert considerable influence. The same goes for Japanese, given that the cuisine of the land of the rising sun has already conquered many palates in the western portion of the planet. It should be said, by the way, that the word “soy” comes from the Japanese “shoyu” – translated as “soy sauce”.