Month names collection / metastudy

[davidma]

Regarding the months, I think there is something with the May and June months that could be worth knowing.

As a catalan ninja, I should tell you that May is nowaday written Maig, but it is pronounced a bit like match. Note that in the Voynich, we have may (with that y at the end).

For June, we have Juny, this is sort of the English J (a bit stronger) and "ny" is the same sound of the spanish ñ. In the MS we have sort of yong.

I have the theory that who wrote this, wrote the same sound of the ending of Maig and the same sound of the beginning of Juny with this kind of "y", and he added also "ny" at the end of Juny (as it is written nowadays). OK, now it is Juny and not Jony... but nobody is perfect.

So what I am saying is that maybe the months are in Catalan or in Occitan or a very near language.

I think catalan was suggested before. However I am not convinced by it very much, previous archival research conducted made me believe that the months are written in a local French dialect with heavy germanic influences. There's a few things that make me say this but the main one is Octembre.
To my knowledge Octembre is not found anywhere else but 1300-1500 northeastern France, and this seems to be corroborated by extensive archival research. Moreover, look at the catalan spelling of the months and compare it with the VMs: Jong instead of Juy, augst instead of Agost, iollet instead of juliol, decembre instead of desembre, Maig instead of maŷ. The ŷ is also extremely interesting since the circumflex accent is almost exclusive to the French language and it only appeared after 1505. Ŷ (not to be confused with a dotted y, which was used by french scribes since the 1300s) is also extremely rare and frankly i feel it should be the focus of an in depth investigation since it is even rarer than Octembre or other weird spellings.