SUBJECT PRONOUNS:

A detailed view

 

            This article contains advanced grammar information. You don’t need to know the advanced information. Just be sure to understand what happened to the pronouns and learn them.

            At this course level you may already know the subject pronouns. Here they are, listed by person and number:

 

                        Singular                      Plural

1a Pessoa       Eu                               Nós

2a Pessoa       Tu                               Vós

3a Pessoa       Ele                              Eles

                        Ela                              Elas

 

            You may ask where “você”, the most common pronoun, have gone. Well, “você” is not originally a subject pronoun, but a treatment pronoun. Let’s see some of those treatment pronouns:

 

            Vossa Majestade                                           For kings and queens

            Vossa Alteza                                                 For princes and princesses

            Vossa Santidade                                           For the pope

            Vossa Excelência                                          For presidents and some other politicians

            Vossa Mercê                                                 Formerly used for someone important but                                                                                   who didn’t have a specific title

 

            Keep your attention in the last treatment pronoun: “Vossa Mercê”. With the passage of the years, it started being used merely as a formal pronoun. For this, it started being reduced: Vossa Mercê became vossamecê, then vossamcê, vossemecê, later vosmecê (used for a long time), and, finally…você!!! This also happened in Spanish: Vuestra Merced  became usted.

            The next step for você to become this almost universal pronoun it is now was to start being used not only in formal situations, but also between friends, relatives etc. Today, “você” is used almost like the English pronoun you. When there’s the strict need to be formal (when talking to old people like your grandparents, for example), the treatment forms o senhor (masculine) and a senhora (feminine) are used (I myself use o senhor only for my grandfather). When capitalized, Senhor means “the Lord”.

            With você ascension, pronouns like tu and vós started being ignored in the oral language. The pronoun tu is still used in Portugal and in some Brazilian states, but vós seems to be practically extinct: it can be seen only in ancient texts like the Bible translation.

            As in many other languages and like all other treatment pronouns, você is used with the verb in the 3rd person singular, and its plural, vocês, takes the 3rd person plural. More can be said about você: it’s still being reduced. When talking informally, people just say its last syllable, “cê”, or “cês” (pronounced seys) for the plural. Você  and vocês eliminate the need of two verbal forms in the language: the one for tu (2nd person singular) and that for vós (2nd person plural). In fact, these verbal forms are hardly used. Even the pronoun tu, when used in the oral language, takes the 3rd person form. Você makes the language easier, don’t you think so?

 

A gente

            Another “new” pronoun is “a gente”. It’s not accepted by the traditional grammar, although it’s largely used to replace “nós” (we), specially in informal conversation, but sometimes even in the media, the TV (I’ve heard the President saying it once).

            Like você, a gente also uses the 3rd person singular, due to the fact that “a gente” means, literally, “the people”. The word “gente” is still used to mean “people”, but when one says “a gente” it is understood that he/she is referring to a group of people that includes him/herself.

            In the beginning, a gente was used when someone wanted to make a generical information, like the English “one” and the French “on”, but nowadays it can be considered an authentic 2nd person plural pronoun that uses the 3rd person singular verbal form. Nós is still very used, anyway(sometimes with the verb in the 3rd person singular), being nós and a gente interchangeable.

 

 

            What can be said after this detailed view of the subject pronouns is that the Portuguese spoken in Brazil is moving towards an uniform verbal system (only one or few verb forms for all persons), as it happens more or less with English and oral French. Let’s conjugate a regular verb in the present tense using the “old” and the “new” pronouns, and check if this is true:

 

Old (official) Pronouns           New Pronouns                                   English Translation

 

Eu                   canto              Eu                   canto                          I           sing

Tu                   cantas            Você               canta                          You      sing

Ele/Ela            canta              Ele/Ela            canta                          He       sings

Nós                 cantamos       A gente           canta                          We      sing

Vós                 cantais           Vocês             cantam                       You      sing

Eles/Elas        cantam           Eles/Elas        cantam                       They    sing

 

            Now you can notice that, in the oral language, practically three verbal forms are used (sometimes even the plural form is abandoned, and people say “vocês canta” “eles canta”. You’ll understand how often each pronoun and verbal forms are used by acquiring experience, reading and listening). Is this a sign of evolution?

 

           

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