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- Topic: Portuguese >
- "A carta é real."
16 Comments
It should be correct since both, "card" and "letter", are "carta" in Portuguese.
You're right, unless you mean a playing card, which is "carta".
- There is one card left in his hand = Tem uma carta restante na mão dele
Does your sentence though also translate to there is one letter left in his hand?
Funny, I just wrote something similar a couple hours or so ago in the Bee Letter Writing discussion.
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/676268
Sooooo, given that carta also means playing card, why does DL not accept card as a correct translation? Does it have to say, "playing card" or is that also not accepted here?
My sense is that for most people these days, the playing cards are only in [on] their computers... er, devices.
But I have also not heard of a lot of counterfeit playing cards. :D
To answer to the accepting thing... I really do not think "card" should be accepted without the qualifying "playing" adjective attached to it as otherwise people will not learn that there is a perfectly fine word for card that doesn't involve shuffling and dealing (just signing).
My friend in Portugal calls a gift card, postal which confused me greatly as we were not intending to send it, but give it with a hand-delivered package. Now I will confuse him by calling them letters.
Or maybe maps... :D
"Real" and "autêntico(a)" have slight different means.
"Real" indeed exsits. (Even if it's not authentic, it exists) Imagine you are talking about a letter everyone supposes that was written, but nobody knows for sure. Then one day you find "a carta é real".
"Autêntico" is not fake.
"Verdadeiro" can be used as "authentic" too.
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On a kind of random note, isn't the Brazilian currency the "real?" Is there any connection with it meaning "real?"
In portuguese "real" means both "real" and "royal". I think the currency has more to do with "royal".
In Brazil, we never think about where the name of our currency comes from. But it's a very very new currency, taking effect from 1994 on.
Now thinking about it, the term "real" appeared a little before with the "cruzeiro real" currency. (Which is also relatively new: 1993 - You can't believe how many currencies I've seen in such a short period while I was a kid)
At that point, there wasn't anything in Brazil suggesting royalty in any way. We were already a democracy (cough).
On the other hand, our first currency was called "Réis", directly from Portugal. This article says the singular of "Réis" is "real", and that's indeed related to royal. This curerncy was valid up to 1833, so no living Brazilian knew it. This one suggests the current "real" was chosen after the old "real".
Up to now, I had no idea that the singular form of "réis" was "real". We are used to think there is simply no singular form, and the word "réis" means absolutely nothing but the name of that currency.
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Better still, why doesn't the faster one say either? I've listened a dozen times and it isn't there and I don't usually have trouble hearing it when they run words together. Is it typical to not pronounce é in the spoken language?
