Professor Adjunto UFRGS;
Mestrado em Literatura Alemã e Americanística (1984, FU Berlim - Alemanha);
Doutorado Literatura Comparada (2002, IL - UFRGS);
Professor do Instituto Goethe em Berlim, São Paulo e Porto Alegre;
Leitor do DAAD na Universidade do Porto, Portugal;
Professor visitante na UFRGS;
Desde 1995, professor efetivo do Setor de Alemão/Instituto de Letras/UFRGS;
Chefe do Departamento de Línguas Modernas (2003-2005);
Pós-Doutorado na Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universität em Bonn, Alemanha (2005-2006);
Coordenador das Literaturas Estrangeiras Modernas no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/UFRGS (2007-2009).
The present article deals with a phenomenon of the portuguese language which is well-known and yet rather neglected in brazilian schools as well as in schools abroad: metaphony. Since this regular vowel change is a phenomenon that foms part exclusively of speech and is not represented in writing, it constitutes a problem for foreign learners, in our case speakers of German. We therefore propose a strategy by the help of which the phenomenon of metaphony in Portuguese can be explained, based on analogies with a similar regular sound change in the German language, called Umlaut. Our study is based upon data collected among students at Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Northern Germany
