The Voynich Ninja

Here are some early month name citations.

Use them as you will. No credit necessary.

Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

The month names of Jung, July, Septembre are shown in a calendar starting at:

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Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

The month names in question more or less fit a number of languages, sice they derive from Latin anyway.

Lexer quotes abrille and aberelle for April You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

augst for August You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


For September through December, however, it looks like "-ber" was the MHD form, and not "-bre" as in the VMS.

(04-02-2016, 08:41 PM)don of tallahassee Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The month names of Jung, July, Septembre are shown in a calendar starting at:

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Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

FYI, just a small detail, Don, but important if we're looking at spellings...

Many of the early Latin abbreviations in Carolingian and Merovingian documents were based on numbers (numbers 2, 3, 7, 9, etc.) and the one at the end of words that commonly stands for -us/-um was a 9 (not a "g", and is written the same way as it is in the VMS, but sometimes superscripted). Graduallly, In the middle ages, the 3 evolved to look more like a "z" (in some documents, the 7 also resembles a "z") and the 2 sometimes looks like the VMS "r".


When I saw your message, I was going to mention in this document it's probably Jun9 (Junus) until I actually looked at the page and noticed it says Junii. The last "i" is extended (has a descender) in much the same way as a terminal-n sometimes has an descending tail. It's a flourish, so June in this picture is spelled Junii.


It would also be easy to mistake Junii and Julij for being written the same way because the last letter in Julij also looks like it has a tail, but it's not the same ending. July is written with "ij" (this evolved from "ii" with a flourished tail but became treated differently and in this manuscript is distinguished by the dots over the letters and probably by its sound). The "ii" became "ij" and then evolved into a ligature which became the shape we now recognize as the letter "y", until the "ij" almost completely disappeared (except in Dutch where they still have an "ij" combination).

Native English speakers have difficulty distinguishing ii from ij by sound (and can't pronounce ij very well) because the ij sound doesn't exist in English. The difference still exists in some Scandinavian words, as in the distinction between the"i" in "vise" (to show) and the "y" in "lys" (light).

Not sure if we have this thread in the proper subforum.

Anyway.

I've consulted the Idiotikon recently for some month names featured as the VMS marginalia. The Idiotikon is the ongoing project of composing a dictionary of Swiss German dialects, and it is expected to be finished within several years.

It's accessible here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , and also it's linked to the search on woerterbuchnetz.de.

Here we have the "Augst": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The article bursts with lingusitic terms, zweisilbige and the like, and it also has references to sources as psalters etc. The bad thing is that the resource does not allow copying text, so I can't feed all that zweisilbiges into Google translator. It would be great if somebody speaking German could read all that, explain what's being said  and make some use of the references.

It's interesting that while August is August, Augustin is September

Here we have the "Aberil": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with a note that this variant comes from Glarus. That may be of interest.

I thought I have seen Mars as well, but I must be mistaken. They have it as Marz or Merz.

It's indicative that "may" is with diacritic on the first occasion and without on the second. This suggests that this was the time when this diacritic was being phased out and considered non-mandatory - which may give a hint as to the time period.

@Rene
I took a quick look at the names of the months at your link.
It says "yony ( jony )" and " jollea"
Thus all names of the month correspond to the same (Bavarian) dialect form.
Why he uses the female form of Julius I cannot say.

It depends on where and when you look.
It's crazier and more varied than you think.
bavarian is not the same as bavarian.


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It's varied, but within certain limits. The VM month names clearly belong in a Romance context.