Month names collection / metastudy

[davidma]

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. Register or Login to view.


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.