Tag: João dos Reis Gomes

Posted in Portuguese

Natais – Contos e Narrativas de João dos Reis Gomes

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Desisti de ler este livro porque ler contos natalícios após o natal é deprimente, mas acho que irei voltar à carga em Dezembro de 2026, e já tenho suficiente do sabor da leitura para escrever uma opinião.

João Reis de Gomes era um madeirense que escreveu vários contos e retratos do natal na ilha. Alguns têm temas religiosos, outros exemplificam a tendência por parte dos leitores verem a festa como uma estação de nostalgia. 

And if that sounds interesting, you can get a copy here, or score an amazing antiquarian version here.

Posted in English

Sete-Estalos and Surprising Suffixes

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Reading “Natais – Contos e Narrativas” by João dos Reis Gomes and came across this phrase that seems to be unknown on the Web.

It’s just some sort of firecracker or cap that goes bang when you throw it on the ground though, according to my wife. Some sort of party snap or cap bomb, I suppose. Do they even make those any more? I haven’t seen anything like it for a while.

The book is quite challenging because it has a lot of unusual words and madeiran regionalisms. One of the new words that struck me was “indelével”.

Very obvious what that means but I don’t think I’ve come across it before and it’s surprising because I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen a word ending in “ével”. Of someone had asked me to guess how to say indelible I would have had it ending in “ível”, for sure.

Hm, I seem to be blogging in English again. Lazy.