Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

...

Back in those days, in places such as John Dee's England, there was no consistency in spelling like we have today. I've seen the same word spelled as many as three or four different ways. At times, an author would even deliberately alter his spellings of the same word in a single passage to impress the reader! It was all based on pronunciation, and in that context, abriue is fully plausible.

Any thoughts?

abriue might be plausible from a philosophical point of view, but it doesn't look like abriue. It looks like ab'ril (aberil or abiril) and inserting a vowel is less harsh than abril, and making it less harsh was a characteristic of the Provençal region that may have been true for areas surrounding it as well. I don't know if you've heard Swiss German, but it sounds quite different from German even though it's mostly written the same.

In languages that used Latin scribal conventions, you can't ignore the ticks and lines and circles above and between the letters. They were, in a sense, part of the "alphabet" in those days, the same way we use an apostrophe (except they had a lot of different kinds of apostrophes). The month-labels scribe used them on almost every month.


Also, besides the fact that it looks like ab'ril, why would all the other labels be month names and then April be a completely different word like "opened"?