The Voynich Ninja

Omniglot has a list of month names in various languages -->You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Manx for  'April'  is  'Averil'  but none of the other Manx month names are a good fit.

(12-06-2025, 06:15 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-06-2025, 12:35 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In all of the numerous examples, there is great variety in what comes after "br", but I have not seen a single case where there is anything between the "b" and the "r", so that certainly makes occitan more doubtful.

Some languages and scripts do not have consonant clusters like "br", and their speakers will insert vowels into them.  Japanese native speakers, for example, would transcribe and pronounce "abril" as "a-bi-ri-ru" or "a-bu-ri-ru".

In Northeast Brazil, a railroad tie is called "chulipa" ("shoo-LEE-pa").  That is what the local workers heard when the British engineers who built the first railroads in the 1800s said "sleeper".  The "sl" cluster is very rare in Portuguese, and never word-initial.

BTW, "April" is written "abril" in modern Portuguese and Spanish too.

I guess many examples could be found. Not directly related to 'br', but for instance Eastern Lombard (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) does not like the sequence 'dr' and often (but not always) adds an intervening 'e': 'màder' (mother, cfr. Italian 'madre'), 'pàder' (father, cfr. Italian 'padre'), 'làder' (thief, cfr. Italian 'ladro') (*). In Dutch the sequence 'rkt' is often pronounced with an added schwa, ie. 'markt' (market) is pronounced [ˈ'mɑ.rəkt].

(*) 'làder' is from Latin 'latro', so an 'e' has surely been added here. 'màder' and 'pàder' could have retained the original form of Latin nominatives mater and pater, but I guess they instead were taken from the accusatives matrem and patrem (as happened for most nouns) and the 'e' was added here too for phonetic reasons.

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BTW, "April" is written "abril" in modern Portuguese and Spanish too.
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Since both languages are related to Latin, it would also fit in with Alpine Latin.

(12-06-2025, 12:38 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In Dutch the sequence 'rkt' is often pronounced with an added schwa, ie. 'markt' (market) is pronounced [ˈ'mɑ.rəkt].

Correct ;-) and by Dutch people for that matter. This is true more generally for 'rk' and 'lk':

Written 'kerk' -> spoken 'kerrek' (church).
Written 'melk' -> spoken 'mellek' (milk).
This is considered incorrect though and newsreader typically would not to that. This may have changed in  modern TV times. 

Now 'br' and its cousins pr, pl, bl, are easier to pronouce for a much greater group of people.
Interesingly of course Portuguese does not like the 'l' here and puts the 'r' instead.

They are a bit more tricky for East Asian people, even though these particular combinations are quite common in Thai. In certain parts of the country, the 'l' and 'r' are simply dropped though, when speaking. This causes numerous 'collisions' but people tend not to be confused. I am not so fortunate there....

Anyway. Having the 'b' in April is already not common, so for me it is worth it to continue the search.

I don't think I've ever pronounced melk or kerk without the added schwa. Omitting it immediately makes you sound like a newsreader. But yeah, this is quite natural since the locus of schwa sits in between l and k.

For aberil, b and v and p and r are all pronounced at the front of the mouth. So maybe there is less of an incentive there to introduce a schwa?

How about a folk etymological motivation? Some form derived from Latin aperire?

(13-06-2025, 12:43 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anyway. Having the 'b' in April is already not common, so for me it is worth it to continue the search.

I agree of course. Maybe an expert in the phonetics (and history of phonetics) of European languages could give some informed opinion about which language could have been more likely, phonetically, to have or develop the form 'aberil' around the 1400s? But it looks to be a hard question too.

I didn’t expect Aberil to occur in a German dialect. It seems likely that also the Glarus reference originally pointed out by Searcher (Yulia) is about German / Alemannic, though of course it would be interesting to have confirmation and find more examples.

The map for Octembre You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is not too distant from Muri and has points that look very close to the Swiss border. But of course there is the problem that Octebre appears to be strictly French, so it is puzzling to see it occur together with what evidence suggests is a German variant for April. One could speculate that, in a border region like, say, Alsace, the two languages could get mixed, but personally I don’t find this scenario very likely for something as basic as a list of month names. I guess that a possible line of investigation could be examining whole sequences of the twelve months and rank them according to some quantitative measure...

(13-06-2025, 02:56 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I guess that a possible line of investigation could be examining whole sequences of the twelve months and rank them according to some quantitative measure...

This is probably the way to go. It would be interesting to learn what we should expect in a full series of month names that contain some of the forms. For example, in a full calendar that uses "octembre", what is given for the other months? Is there a region where we can include more peculiarities?

There must be some kind of heuristic method akin to searching transcribed legal documents that can help us with this, but I haven't found it yet.

The p/b sound change is found in at least two Alsace manuscripts.[attachment=10812]

I have done some digging and found a couple interesting things. Using Frederic Godefroy's "Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle", I have found a couple of examples of northern French spelling where the months of "averil" and "augst" are exactly as written in the VM. Interestingly, both examples are from Normandy. One is from the bailiff of Cotentin from 1394, and one from Philippe de Thaun's Bestiaire from the 1130s. I have attached them below. To my knowledge, these have not been discussed on this forum.