(22-10-2026, 03:05 PM)proto57 wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you think one 15th c. scribe knew these forms and used them for some reason? Do you think multiple scribes were penning these names, each individual writing in their own language and style?
I mean, how would others explain this, having rejected my own scenario? It may sound like a challenge, and there is an element of that of course... but I am really curious about this. I am often challenged, myself... of course, and really don't mind. It gets me thinking about problems and assets to my own ideas, and forces me to explore both reasons for some feature or another, and consider whether or not any ideas I have are viable or not. But it would be helpful to me to know how others explain the same features I am asked to explain, but in their alternate scenarios, such as 1420 Genuine Cipher Herbal.
I have no "good" explanation for why these exact forms were used. If we look at the sequence, all of the forms except 'aberil' and 'augst' strongly suggest some kind of french dialect, meaning an 8-2 split of french to german (or 7-3 if the may is not french). As for why someone would write 8 months in one language, and 2 in another is impossible to answer. So, here are my hypotheses:
1) Mistake by a bilingual scribe
I have come across many examples of mixed sequences, but mostly "german+latin" , "french+latin" and "dutch+latin".
For example, we have a dutch+latin sequence that goes:
maert, aprille, meye, junius, julius, oest, september, october, nouember, december
And we have a french sequence (that i can't add yet as everything is down) that goes:
mars, apuril, may*, junius, juillet, aoust, septembre, octobre, nouembre, decembre
Why did that author randomly write a latin month name instead of french? Why did that dutch writer use a 4/6 split? We will never know. But I imagine that both scribes were used to writing/using latin in their work, which may have caused them to write latin by mistake, or absent mindedly.
So, this explanation is effectively the exact same scenario as the cases above, but with a single person who was fluent (or often wrote in/used) both french and german, which was less likely than "native language + latin".
2) A rare dialect somewhere on the border of the french/german speaking regions
This hypothesis is that somewhere along the border of french/german populations that there existed a dialect that broadly matched what is seen in the VMS. We do see a large variety of dialects there, but generally people either point and say "langue d'oil" or "langue d'oc".
So far, "langue d'oïl" has far more usage of 'o' in june and july, high levels of octembre, and stretches into flanders where aougst has been seen in french, and where "ougst, oogst, oogst" were attested forms of dutch. On the other side, "Langue d'oc" examples are far rarer to come across -in part due to the history of the region- but has the huge advantage of using "abril" for april. 'octembre' has been seen as well, but the scale is impossible to tell with so few examples. Unfortunately for d'oc, usage of g in june seems to not be present at all.
But what big oïl (haha) and big occ don't want you to know is that there is another potential option: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Arpitan)
This language/dialect spans from eastern france into western switzerland, NW italy, and transitions both north into the langues d'oïl, and south into the langues d'oc (but is seperate to both). Going by the information in that wiki article, these dialects were not strongly uniform, and had "scores of highly peculiar local variations that never merged over time".
This is something i'm actively researching, so I can't give you a perfect answer here, but we do have some entries that "dont fit in", like an entry that has join/joignet/aost from Franche-Comté. Incidentally, the lone "joilet" that we have comes from the same area. Many unusual entries are also currently listed as originating from "?", too (in some cases probably because the exact dialect is hard to ascertain). A dialect like this ticks many boxes for a potential solution:
- spelling was inconsistent and varied a lot
- it stretched into areas where german could have been spoken
- the non-uniform/'unofficial' nature of the language makes it far less likely to be used (and less likely to be found)
Similarly weirdly, the forms seen in langue d'oc entries share a lot of the featues seen in Metz (NE france), such as the form "auost", and the habit of adding 's' or 'z' to the end of names (septembres, octembres, nouembres etc). I don't know what to make of that yet.
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My personal preference leans to "rare, currently unattested dialect". Yes, there is currently no proof that such an exact dialect existed, but we know that many unique dialects did exist. We are constantly finding new, interesting, otherwise-unattested forms, and going forward we will likely continue to find them as there seems to be a large pool of them undiscovered. Due to this, I find it entirely possible that the VMS forms may be found amongst them given enough searching.
I do obviously see the issue here in that neither can be disproven, and I could always say "well, we haven't found it yet". This is true, but even if the forms are never found it is entirely possible that they existed and then were lost to history, like 100s of other unique dialects have been. It is arguably what we should expect from such a dialect, so it completely normal if it is the case and not proof of forgery.
Therefore, the best I can give you is that the month names are consistent with what we would expect from a genuine, obscure, potentially lost dialect -or a mistaken mixing of 2 languages- but they are not proof of the VMS being genuine. I would say that the lack of attestation for a full sequence is not evidence of forgery either, as many otherwise-unattested sequences exist as well.
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