(15-06-2025, 10:48 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here's "May" with a dot. Northern France (?) · 15th century (2nd third?)
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I was particularly interested in this dotted y and tried to find a bit more about it. It tunrs out that it was a common way of writing it before the 1500s, that and the "plumed" y that nablator mentioned in his earlier reply and that can be found in many manuscripts. The reason why it was used was that the dotted i was hard to write whereas y was much easier and clearer. The dotted y seemed to be rare but used primarily in legal documents. I feel like it needs to be revised from the initial ŷ to a separate character, as it did not directly develop into the circumflex accent. If you read french you can read more about it here, on page 9 of the introduction: You are not allowed to view links.
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However, this is good news for us because it helps us place the ŷ in a very specific context. It is now generally assumed whoever wrote the month names on the VM was not the original scribe, and they were written at a later date. Beaulieux in the above mentioned "Histoire de l'orthographe française" shows how the first widely circulated treatise on the usage of accents in vulgar french was the 1533 Doctrine by Montfleury. You can find the integral text in the annex of the book linked above. In that docuemnt, the authors specifically allow for the usage of the circumflex with vowels when there is a truncation (like in latin) or an extension (i.e. a double vowel). Note that a e i o u all commonly take the circumflex whereas y is extremely rare. Already by the late 1500s and early 1600s the ŷ had been dropped and it doesn't figure in later treatises on accents.
If the names of the months were written by someone who spoke French (not necessarily as a first language), then the ŷ is a dead giveaway that whoever wrote them did so after 1533 and before the 1590s/1600s. I am also inclined to believe that they were written closer to the 1533 date as it was a period of quick experimentation and peculiar forms like the ŷ disappeared quickly from textbooks on accents. Montfleury is the only one I could find that does not explicitly limit the usage of the circumflex to a e i o u. These exclusions were already included in other manuals published from 1580 onwards.
(16-06-2025, 09:41 AM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Note that a e i o u all commonly take the circumflex whereas y is extremely rare.
We need examples of ŷ in manuscripts to be more confident of the possible date range.
I doubt it is so late in the 16th century: the unusual "e" was probably obsolete by then.
(16-06-2025, 09:41 AM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, this is good news for us because it helps us place the ŷ in a very specific context.
Yes! That's what I meant before. It would explain a lot, like why the accent is only on one "may" and not the other: if we are correct, it would be imposed by grammarians and not essential in any way. It just means "we once pronounced this as a diphthong but now not anymore".
I agree that if this is indeed what we are seeing in the VM, it does limit our timeframe to a few decades in the middle of the 16th century.
There is still the option that the month names writer put the accent there as a fluke. But it would align with the idea of marking monophthongization. It would be interesting to know if this was actually used much outside of grammarians' works.
Given all this, I feel pretty confident in placing the month names as written between 1533 and 1580. For me the next crucial step is narrowing down the time and place of likely origin, we have a complete list with very peculiar spelling for months (aberil, jong, though it could be joing as the i and the n quite often were not clearly demarcated, iollet, augst, octembre) and we have now a pretty convincing narrower origin date between 1533 and the 1580s. If we can find similar spelling in documents from that time I think we will be a step closer to adding a missing piece of the puzzle to the history of the VM before the 1600s.
(16-06-2025, 09:41 AM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you read french you can read more about it here, on page 9 of the introduction: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.+
Quote:Quant à l’y, qui est surmonté d’un point, dans les mss. latins, et dans les mss. français en écriture Caroline, où il est d’ailleurs rare, mais qui est employé d’une façon abusive dans les mss. des gens de justice, ou bien il est sans accent dans ces mss., ou bien l’accent y est tracé sans que le copiste ait levé sa plume, et il fait corps avec la lettre elle-même.
Google Translation Wrote:As for the y, which is surmounted by a point, in the Latin mss., and in the French mss. in Caroline script, where it is rare, but which is used in an abusive way in the mss. of the people of justice, either it is without accent in these mss., or the accent is traced there without the copyist having lifted his pen, and it becomes one with the letter itself.
Caroline script! So the custom is much older than the 15th century.
(16-06-2025, 10:07 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (16-06-2025, 09:41 AM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Note that a e i o u all commonly take the circumflex whereas y is extremely rare.
We need examples of ŷ in manuscripts to be more confident of the possible date range.
I doubt it is so late in the 16th century: the unusual "e" was probably obsolete by then.
I agree, I think Gallica is our best friend here, there is a ton of manuscrits on it we could have a look through. I also feel that the e shape points to the names being written closer to the 1533 date rather than later.
(16-06-2025, 10:15 AM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree, I think Gallica is our best friend here, there is a ton of manuscrits on it we could have a look through. I also feel that the e shape points to the names being written closer to the 1533 date rather than later.
The writing became a lot less formal in the 16th century and the last remnants of Bastarda visible in the spiky "e" should have disappeared already around the end of the 15th century, which is my preferred date. We may have an outlier with a normal 16th century writing except for the "e".
So the questions we're trying to answer are:
* When did people stop using spiky "e"
* When did people actually start putting an unambiguous circumflex on "y" or "ay" (and was this widely used at all)
I would also take into account the spiky 3 of the folio numbers, which I still expect might link them to the script of the month names.
(16-06-2025, 11:04 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So the questions we're trying to answer are:
* When did people stop using spiky "e"
According to this article You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. the latest appearance of bâtarde française in print (in Lyon) was in the 1560s, but its use consistently declined during the 1530s. So if the spiky e comes from lingua bastarda then it is unlikely than the months we're written much after 1560. Although obviously the paper refers to print, it could very well be that the person writing used the spiky form because he was used to them and didn't bother changing the way he wrote.
I'm spot checking manuscripts on Gallica. Is this style of writing "e" mostly a French thing? I hadn't noticed its prevalence before. I mean the style where you have a bottom curve as part of the cursive flow and then an almost separate zigzag on top.
So far I'm having a hard time finding decent circonflexes in manuscripts that use spiky "e".
These MSS also tend to use roman numerals, so I haven't been able yet to check whether they use spiky "3" as well. The search continues.