Is Portuguese really difficult?

Comparing some aspects of the normative grammar of the Portuguese language with those of other European languages

Abstract

This article presents the first stage of the research project Comparative grammar of European languages: contrastive analysis of the standard norm of the main Western European languages (Romance and Germanic), whose objectives are: 1) to compare the main topics of the normative grammars of several languages of international diffusion, including Portuguese, in terms of number of grammatical rules and greater or lesser complexity of these rules; and 2) to answer, based on the comparative study carried out, the common question “is Portuguese really a difficult language?”, in view of frequent comments by both Portuguese speakers/writers and foreigners that the grammar of the Portuguese language is very complex, which has even given rise, on the part of some linguists, to proposals for simplifying the standard norm of Portuguese based on uses of contemporary oral cultured Brazilian Portuguese. In this first stage of the project, four grammatical topics are contrastively analyzed, namely, pronoun placement, inflected infinitive, future subjunctive, and cardinal and ordinal numerals, in six languages, four of which are Romance (Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian) and two are Germanic (English and German), based on consultation of renowned normative grammars of the languages ​​under study and systematization of grammatical rules and their exceptions. It is concluded that pronoun placement in standard Portuguese is much more complex than in other languages, presenting at least 12 different rules compared to only one or two in the other five languages; that the inflected infinitive only occurs in Portuguese and, in regular verbs, is confused with the future tense of the subjunctive mood, which also only exists today in Portuguese; and that the formation of ordinal numerals occurs mainly by mere suffixation from the corresponding cardinals in all languages analyzed, with the exception of Portuguese and Spanish, which resort to borrowings from Latin ordinal numerals.