‘Merry Christmas’ in European languages

The following map shows how to say (or rather write) the equivalent of “Merry Christmas” in European languages (not all minority languages are included this time because the map would be too cluttered otherwise). The colouring corresponds to etymological relations between the translations of the word Christmas (i.e. not to language families and not to relations between other parts of the phrase).

This leads to a few unexpected results. Even though Romanian and Hungarian are completely unrelated languages, the words karácsony and Crăciun come from a common root (either Proto-Slavic *korčiti or Latin creātiōnem).

The Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic words are all borrowed from Romance languages and are related to French Noël. The same holds true for the Turkish expression, which is directly borrowed from French.

Something quite unusual happens in Czech and Slovak. The words Vánoce and Vianoce are derived from German Weihnachten by retaining the “Weih” part (which comes from an old Germanic expression meaning “holy”) and replacing nachten (“nights”) by the Czech/Slovak translation, “noce”. However, the word “noce” itself comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root as German “Nachten” (and English “nights”), so the Czech/Slovak and German expressions are essentially etymologically equivalent.

Here are the same phrases as above as a text so that you can copy-paste them: