"Minha vó não corre em fevereiro."
Translation:My grandmother does not run in February.
20 Comments
I'm so sorry, grandmother! :-( I've thought you were grandfather and also hadn't noticed that fevereiro is actually a month and not fever ;-) :-D :-P I will never let you run again as grandfather with fever!
Do you forgive me, please? :-)
"Avó" and "vó" with an acute accent both mean grandmother, and "avô" and "vô" with a circumflex mean grandfather.
Thank you! I was having a hard time telling them apart. Do "vó" and "vô" have different pronunciations?
A native Brazilian speaker really needs to comment on this, but as a non-native speaker married to a Brazilian that hears more Portuguese spoken at home than English, I hear my boys talk to and refer to their grandmother.
To my ears, vó (grandmother) has a softer 'o' sound than vô (grandfather). In fact, vó almost seems to have a soft 'a' sound (think short vowel sound), whereas vô almost has hard 'o' sound (think long vowel sound).
In addition to the fact I'm not a native speaker, there is also the minor detail of my poor hearing. So, please take this with an extra grain of salt. However, I am able to distinguish between the two now, and the above explanation is how I distinguish them in my mind. Lastly, if you plug each one into Google Translate and click the microphone button, you can get a feel for the difference.
There is no difference in the length of the vowels. Avó (or vó, informally) has an open O (like in pOt), while avô (or vô, informally) has a closed O (like in fOam).
Actually, what he's referring to isn't the time-length of the vowel, but rather what we Americans typically learn in school as children. We learn to identify the "o" in "hot" as "short" and the "o" in "toe" as "long" (linguistically it's because these sounds used to actually differ from each other in time-length, before the "great vowel shift") -- so it more-or less matches your examples
Here's another good place to hear the difference
For the British on here, could this please be made to accept 'granny'?
731
I wrote "granny", but is was not accepted. Maybe I should wait for "vovozinha" to translate it this way?
I was corrected to "Minha Avó......" which is kind of ridiculous because I really cannot hear the "a" in "avó", but oh well.....
So I must ask: When is vó used as opposed to avó? Is it a question of formality? As in pai vs. papai, mae vs mamae?
(Sorry I didn't add the accents, I'm typing on a PC and haven't quite figured out how to insert special characters yet and I'm tired of cutting and pasting).
I think "vó" is used almost all the time. We tend to shorten words.
"Vovó" is a cute way to refer to your grandma, usually used by children.
