Everything was extremely funny, hehe. Being myself a native Portuguese speaker (from Brazil) I hope I never said any aberration like that Mr. Carolino. I reckon that Portuguese and English have completetly different gramatical strucutures, and if you try to make a literal translation (that is, word by word without respecting the structure) the result would be a meaningless mess.
A little example:
It might be weird, but every Portuguese word has a "gender". It is denoted by two article("o" to male, and "a" to female) rather than only one in English(the article "the"). POrtuguese doesn't have a pronoun like "it". Everything is a "he" or a "she" The table, for instance is female, and we say "A mesa", in Portuguese. Obviously, "the man" is male, and we say "O homem", and "the woman" is female, hence "a mulher" in Portuguese.
The main rule is: if the word ends with an "o", it is male: the car - o carro, the hair - o cabelo, the glass - o copo. But there are several exceptions that make this language even harder to learn. The tribe, for instance, is "a tribo", and there is no apparent reson to that. The umbrella is "o guarda-chuva", and so on.
[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Lampion ]