Month names collection / metastudy

[davidma]

It shows pretty well where the problems lie. We focus on the "-embre" months in French dialects, but then certain things  are hard to find:

• aberil: "b" is absent so far, but we have some in between vowels.
  
• yong: there is usually a digraph for the vowel (ui) or a single "u". Having any "o" in there is rare.
  
• iollet: same.
  
• augst: this is almost always "aoust" without the "g". 
  
• octembre is rarer than octobre
  

For what it is worth, I have noticed that the shift from aueril to apuril seems to happen in documents written after the first decades of the 1500s. 
The Jong in the VM could very well be "Joing", which is a common form of the month name in French, it is really hard to tell cause the space is very little and the writing is crammed, it wasn't uncommon to merge the i and the n. It is also interesting that there is vowel consistency between Jong and Jollet.
Augst is interesting since it doesn't look like it was written that way to save space. However, the final -gst is not unheard of in XVIth century manuscripts.
The one I am the most worried about is octembre, "octobre" seemed to be completely standardised by the 1500s, I have yet to find even one significant difference in spelling for that month name. All of the examples of "octembre" that i could find were from the 1300s/1400s. 

It would have been really good to have Janvier and Fevrier as well   Also something to keep in mind is that the VM was very likely destined to private use, so the scribe of the months might have used colloquial forms for the month names that would not be reflected in contemporary published books or "official" manuscripts such as record books and livres d'heures.