Wherefore art thou, aberil?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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.