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The public opinion is that Portuguese is a silly language. However, it begs the question of whether the Portuguese people are the silly ones, thereby making their language silly, or the language is silly by and of itself. This question of the root cause of silliness is not of paramount importance. Addressing it scientifically would imply giving the language itself to another group of people and check if in their hands the language continues to get sillier. Unfortunately, the Portuguese made this scientific experiment as part of their world plundering endeavor. So, we can compare the Portuguese Portuguese with the Brazilian Portuguese, for instance.
This minor contribution to the interdisciplinary studies on the silliness of the Portuguese language shall examine a specific aspect that increases the confusion monumentally for those who try to learn the language.
Collected Evidence
You live in the suburbs. To go to work, you will have to take a train. In Portugal, this object is called comboio. In the early times of industrialization, the Portuguese noticed that you can add or subtract wagons in and out of a train. So it was like a convoy of trains, um comboio de trens, very much like the convoys of horse-carts at the time. Later on, as trains got common, they thought this was too long to say. So they looked at the word and thought that the essential part of it was the comboio and not the trem. The reasonable Brazilians kept trem, the one that actually matters. Now in Portugal, to go to work, you have to catch a convoy and this is supposed to make sense.
You are traveling to a different city. You want to send a postcard to a friend. In all reasonable languages, the postcard would be shortened as a card – in contrast to everything else you can find a post office (paper, envelopes, cardboard boxes, etc.). The word for it in Portugal is postal. Of course the original word was cartão-postal, a direct translation from the original word. The Portuguese looked at the word, looked at the object, and thought that the distinctive part of the word was the post and not the card. So you would go to a post office and say “I want to post a post.” and somehow you would be understood by your peers.
Then you want to eat. Let’ say you eat meat. A common simple choice would be a beefsteak. What’s this word? It’s the steak of a cow. Culinary name for cattle meat is beef in English and the etymology has a long history of nobles doing noble things and fighting between the French and the English. The French nowadays say bifteck, understandably. But the Portuguese would never give in to such simplicity. They looked at the word, and they thought “what identified this meat in comparison to anything else we eat is…” that it’s beef. They called it bife. So in Portugal you can eat cutlets, you can eat loins, you can eat ribs, or alternatively you can choose bife. Now, bear with me a bit longer. As the Portuguese got rid if steak and were left with bife, they confused themselves even further. Because they figured you can do slice any kind of meat, so for instance you can slice a turkey (peru) and you would call the dish bife de peru. Their generalized confusion reached such levels that today, in Portugal, you can get a restaurant menu with bife de vaca (beef beef) as an option.
Now, let’s pretend you are not in a restaurant but in a friend’s house. You will have lunch together. Your friend asks you to set the table. You will not use a tablecloth. Instead, your friend asks you to get the placemats from the drawer. These are the individual service mats to protect the surface of the table. The Portuguese looked at these products. First and for a brief period of time, they accepted them as such and called them [serviços] individuais de mesa. But you can’t stop a proactive Portuguese person. Your friend asks which individuais you prefer to use. There are literally three words there. You could pick any of the serviço, individual and mesa. What the Portuguese thought was the most context-appropriate among them was the individual. So now you have to pick your favorite individual to eat your beef beef on.
Finally, you go to the beach. Your favorite beach activity is to play… matkot or beach padel. The game is very common but the word is less so, so let me explain. This is like beach tennis, but your rackets would be maybe smaller and you wouldn’t have a net. So you have a padel, a ball, and you hit the ball towards each other – typically played by two people. Now, as a Portuguese person, you have quite a few options. You could use the words beach, tennis or padel (which is itself of Spanish origin), but it should be short too. What would you do? Yes, of course you could say jogar raquete. No padel, no beach, nor any balls involved. You play racket. This is what the Portuguese found specific enough to describe the activity.
Do we need to actually understand this?
No. The entire Portuguese culture can be reduced to five expressions [see lecture notes here] and those expressions do not include such silliness (they carry a different class of silliness).
Conclusions
The aforementioned evidence supports the hypothesis that the Portuguese language is silly because of the Portuguese, as some of the evidence distinguishes Portugal from Brazil where the language did not get sillier once separated from the source of silliness.
More research is needed to give more solid verification for the hypothesis. Another line of research could include the lack of more contemporary words like empowerment in Portugal despite of widespread use in Brazil.
