Month names collection / metastudy

[schimmelchampagne]

What stands out to me is that the only 'green-light' term for "aberil' which is 'aberel' is one of the lowest scoring references in the list. It's a German language text, along with several other texts that show "ab*" variations found in other German sources.

The simple reason that German sources score so low is that they use a different naming system for much of the latter part of the year. A person of Germanic background could have dropped the more Germanic traditional names and replaced them with their own preferences using Latin terminology.

I tend to think too much is made of the first <e> in "Aberil," which is probably just an epenthetic schwa. In my opinion the <e> tells us more about the person writing (that they were a phonetic speller) than anything linguistic. I suppose it could indicate that the person writing had a hard time pronouncing the /br/ cluster. I have wondered whether they were writing in their non-native language.