Defective Portuguese

In Portuguese, a few verbs are missing some conjugations. They're called "defective verbs". The standard example is "colorir", to color, which has no first person singular forms. You might say, "Obviously the simple present tense form should just be coloro?" and your language teacher will say that word is forbidden.

Wiktionary has a list of which verbs are defective in continental versus Brazilian, and there's... no overlap. So basically all the verbs have obvious forms, but different countries have different taboos?

To be fair, I have heard that "colorir" is defective in both Continental and Brazilian Portuguese, even though it isn't on both lists. But it's still pretty suspicious pair of lists. And it's pretty weird to have defective verbs at all, regardless of whether they're agreed on.

No comments:

Post a Comment