Say it in portuguese

A native english speaker acquaintance who was taking classes in Portuguese called it "the language of the damned". I did not know him or the language well enough to know if his humorous characterization even approached an accurate assesment of the complexity of the language or if it was more a reflection of his language learning skills.

In my limited contact with Portuguese speakers speaking Portuguese (Brazilian), the language has proven to be a bit odd to my ear. Odder than Italian and Spanish but not quite as odd as French or Japanese (the latter I simply cannot follow, not even a little). I'm not knocking the language - by "odd" I don't mean bad or ugly or negative. Odd means, here, something more like unpenetrable, inscrutable, veiled. Some languages you hear and you get this sense that although you don't understand them, you should understand them. Patterns pop out, you hear sound combination here and there repeated but maybe with a slight shift. They start to draw your attention and serve as windows into other aspects, like speaker variation versus lexical variation. You have no frikkin clue what it means but you do hear apprehendable elements of structure and you might even start to make some generalizations. German and Russian sound like this to me. But not Portuguese. I'll think structure is starting to come, and then it throws me a serious curve ball. I lose the thread, uncertain if the structure deforming moment was just a consequence of the conjunction of the particular speaker's personal style and my ignorance of the language or if it was something important, some step which one must learn but which I cannot possibly follow.

If you want to listen to some samples of Portuguese dialects, the wikipedia page has a few links.

All that above is in fact preamble for the issue of the word "saudade". I ran across saudade and was thinking about Portuguese because I was spending some time not making measurements, instead I was looking up music. I found a remix of some Cesaria Evora songs, which lead me to the word "sodade" and the European Portuguese equivalent, "saudade".

So what does it mean? According to whoever wrote the wikipedia article, "Saudade is generally considered one of the hardest words to translate." I find I usually enjoy words like this. There was one from Japanese a friend described to me a while ago. I think I posted about it. I'll go look. It was a great word.

But back to saudade. Here's a stab at a translation and context for the word, from A.F.G Bell, via Wikipedia and a shit load of other sketchy references (found a JStore book reference to Bell, his book, and the word, but I'm not logged in so I can't read the context of the Bell/saudade reference).

What you get online:
"The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

If this is accurate, I believe I have a translation to add to the pot. It is PhD student-osis. More specifically, it is "(what is felt by) a disenchanted PhD student as she approaches her sixth year"