Causal and Conjugated Infinitives

It's been some time since I've really had a chance to do much with Portuguese. School has been pretty busy, and I've only really just got settled in. But last night, I cracked my Portuguese book for the first time in weeks and got some interesting grammatical surprises.

The first is that Portuguese moves object pronouns quite a bit. Depending on whether a sentence is positive or negative or a question, and on whether it is uttered by a speaker of Brazilian or European Portuguese, the object pronoun may be either just before the verb (as in French) or after it, with a little hyphen. In the latter case, some verbs lose an ending. This will take some practice.

The other interesting surprise concerns what in English is called the causal infinitive. A brief grammar lesson:

In English, we can show our desire for, or causation of, other people's actions by using the infinitive:

I want you to come straight home after school.

He asked me to pick up some milk on my way home.

In many languages, the infinitive cannot be used this way. The same sentences in French would read:

I want that you should come straight home after school.

He asked that I pick up some milk on my way home.

I was rather surprised, then, to find that Portuguese does have a causal infinitive--but with a difference. In Portuguese, the causal infinitive actually conjugates. Endings are tacked on to the infinitive, depending on the person, number, and gender of the object pronoun before it.

This really does blow my mind. Through years of Greek, Latin, French, and the smattering of Russian I had in college and managed to teach myself before leaving for Moscow, I had always understood that the very definition of an infinitive is that it is the unconjugated, pure form of the verb, the form from which all other forms of the verb are made. But apparently Lusophones (Portuguese speakers) don't think that way.

Or speak that way. Or write that way.