{"id":530,"date":"2007-11-29T23:40:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-29T22:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=530"},"modified":"2007-11-29T23:40:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T22:40:00","slug":"jovial-natal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/jovial-natal\/","title":{"rendered":"Jovial Natal"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/viralbus\/2071762115\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2185\/2071762115_abf90dfe6f_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"border: solid 2px #000000;\" \/><\/a> <br \/> <span style=\"font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;\">  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/viralbus\/2071762115\/\">Jovial Natal<\/a>  <br \/>  Originally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/viralbus\/\">viralbus<\/a> <\/span><\/div>\n<p>While I was waiting for the bus the other day, I spotted this Christmas tree in a shop window. It was full of cardboard baubles saying Merry Christmas in various languages.<\/p>\n<p>However, one of them was odd, I thought: It said <i>Jovial Natal<\/i>, and that didn&#8217;t ring any bells. I checked it the next day, and <i>Natal<\/i> is definitely Portuguese, but the normal greeting in that language is <i>Feliz Natal<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>The word <i>jovial<\/i> does exist in Portuguese, however, so I wonder what&#8217;s happened here.  Has somebody made their own translation, dictionary in hand?  It doesn&#8217;t make sense, though, since <i>jovial<\/i> isn&#8217;t a conventional translation of <i>merry<\/i>.  Or is it a rarely used alternative in Portuguese?  A Google search doesn&#8217;t give many results, and they don&#8217;t look native to me.  Or is it not Portuguese after all?  It would have to be a very rare language, though, to not show up in Google searches.<br clear=\"all\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jovial Natal Originally uploaded by viralbus While I was waiting for the bus the other day, I spotted this Christmas tree in a shop window. It was full of cardboard baubles saying Merry Christmas in various languages. However, one of them was odd, I thought: It said Jovial Natal, and that didn&#8217;t ring any bells. I checked it the next day, and Natal is definitely Portuguese, but the normal greeting in that language is Feliz Natal. The word jovial does exist in Portuguese, however, so I wonder [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}