In my Portuguese class we were given this ambiguous phrase as a riddle:
"Maria toma banho porque sua mãe disse ela traga a toalha."
We had to make those words make sense only by adding punctuation and without changing the order of any words. Can you figure it out?
For those who don't speak Portuguese, the phrase above translates to: "Maria takes a bath because her mom said to her bring the towel." Doesn't make much sense!
The trick is that "sua," which means "her" when the following noun is feminine, is also the present third-person singular of the verb "suar," meaning "to sweat." Thus, with a few commas and quotation marks, it suddenly makes sense:
Maria toma banho porque sua. "Mãe," disse ela, "traga a toalha."
=
Maria takes a bath because she sweats. "Mom," she said, "bring the towel."
Not nearly as ambiguous as the "had had had had" example, but a similar lesson regarding the need for punctuation.
Edit: as personlurking pointed out, suar is "to sweat," not (as I put originally) "to smell." Thanks for catching that!
Oh, yes, I remember that one. Portuguese is not my first language, but I am fluent. I've been given that phrase before (and failed on the suar part despite knowing that verb). Tricky, indeed. Just a small correction, suar is to sweat.
I recall a protest sign that said "Veta Dilma!", or "Veto Dilma!" (the President of Brazil), but the protester meant to put a comma in there, as in "Veto, Dilma!" because the protest was about a bill running through congress.
Another one was "Mesmo sujo, governo quer rio Pinheiros sem cheiro" (Even though it's dirty, the government wants the Pinheiros river to be rid of the bad smell). The problem is the wording which makes it seem like the government is dirty, and not the river. Better would have been "Governo quer rio Pinheiros sem mau cheiro, mesmo que sujo" (The government wants the Pinheiros river without the bad smell, even though it's dirty.).
I don't think these.sorts of phrases are valid in Portuguese.