Delicadeza Portuguesa

By: Keegan Terek

May 29, 2014

For a quick lesson in Portuguese phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, you need only walk into one of Lisbon’s countless street cafés and place an order.

As the past four months have taught me, here in Portugal, how you order is just as important as what you order. Whether sitting at the bar of a tasca or leaning over the counter of a pastelaria, the Portuguese practice a strict form of delicadeza—politeness—that closely governs their interactions with servers and other employees. More than just remembering their please and thank yous, Portuguese speakers make use of a series of linguistic mechanisms to voice their requests in the least imposing way possible. To understand the most notorious of these linguistic markers of courtesy, we must look to the morpho-semantic characteristics of certain Portuguese verbs.

When making polite requests, speakers of European Portuguese utilize a verb form known, quite fittingly, as o imperfeito de cortesia—the imperfect of courtesy. Put simply, the imperfect of courtesy looks and sounds exactly the same as the "standard" imperfect indicative, the verb form used in Portuguese to talk about continued or repeated events in the past (e.g. “When I was little, I always wanted a puppy.”) However, while the two verb forms are phonetically and morphologically identical, they express entirely distinct meanings. We can see this semantic distinction clearly in the examples below:

“Queria um café, mas esqueci-me da carteira em casa.” I wanted a coffee, but I forgot my wallet at home.

“Queria um café, se faz favor.” I’d like (I want) a coffee, please.

In the first utterance, the Portuguese verb queria carries the value of the "standard" imperfect indicative, expressing an incomplete action in the past—in this case, “I wanted.” In the second utterance, however, queria carries a different value—the value of the imperfect of courtesy, which, according to Portuguese linguists Cunha and Cintra, expresses a request in the present—“I want.” Though queria, in this case, best translates to the conditional mood in English (“I would like”), it is important to note that the conditional is not typically used outside of formal registers of speech in Portugal. Instead, speakers of European Portuguese opt for the imperfect indicative, giving the form even greater semantic ambiguity.

For some Portuguese, this semantic ambiguity is a poetic marvel worthy of admiration. As popular writer Miguel Esteves Cardoso puts it, queria is “a perfect mixture of the delicate melancholy of the imperfect indicative (‘I wanted … but, I mean, I’ve already resigned myself to accept that if it’s not possible, it’s not a problem, I’m used to it’) and the conditional (‘I would want … but I know that it’s difficult and, given the current circumstances, you would not admire me if it were impossible...’).”

For others, however, the semantic ambiguity of the imperfect indicative is an illogical conflation that demands corrective action. Far from uncommon is the oh-so-clever Portuguese waiter who responds to a customer’s queria with a frustrating “Então já não queres?” The waiter, insisting that queria can only mean “I wanted,” asks the customer disingenuously, “So, you no longer want it?” Such a response suggests that the present tense quero (“I want”) would be a more linguistically accurate option. However, as Cardoso reminds us, using quero “is not only unmannered and arrogant but also not Portuguese. A [true] Portuguese always says queria.”

Whatever your opinion of the Portuguese imperfect of courtesy may be, the verb form is one of seemingly countless tools the Portuguese use to endow their requests with an undoubted air of politeness. The abundance and nearly universal usage of these markers of courtesy, I believe, points to a relationship between customer and employee that is quite different from that which we find in the United States. Whereas in the United States customers expect employees to promptly meet their every need, in Portugal, customers feel almost guilty for inconveniencing employees by asking them for service. Though we might not deserve to feel such guilt when interacting with service staff, we certainly might do well to learn from the courteous perspective of the Portuguese. In doing so, we accept gratefully the coffee that took two minutes longer to prepare than we would have liked and show that delicadeza, whether delivered in the past, present, or conditional, is deserved by customer and employee alike.

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