Month names collection / metastudy

[oshfdk]

I agree, the majority of the places that stand out have either been part of Flanders historically or, like Hainaut, connected to it through the Burgundians. 

I asked Gemini about Flemish and how different it was from medieval Dutch (which I already try to include in my tests), the below is what Gemini said. Does this look reasonable? Personally, I'm mostly interested in language statistics and spelling conventions.

To understand medieval Flemish, it helps to clear up a common modern misconception: in the Middle Ages, Flemish was not a separate language from Dutch.
Instead, "Flemish" (Vlaams) was the most culturally dominant and prestigious dialect of the broader language we now call Middle Dutch (Dietsch or Dietsc). Between the 13th and 15th centuries, the wealthy trading cities of Flanders (like Bruges and Ghent) were the economic powerhouses of northern Europe, meaning their specific regional dialect became the literary and administrative standard for the region.
Here is a breakdown of what it looked like, how it compared to its neighbors, and its closest linguistic relatives.

What Medieval Flemish Looked Like
Medieval Flemish was written in the Latin alphabet using Gothic scripts, but because there were no standardized spelling rules, writers spelled words phonetically. The same word could be spelled three different ways on the same page.
If you looked at a Flemish manuscript from the 14th century (like the famous epic Van den vos Reynaerde — Reynard the Fox), you would notice a few distinct visual characteristics:

• Vowel clusters: To show a long vowel, scribes often wrote it double or added an 'e' or 'i' after it. You would see spellings like ae, oe, and ij (e.g., jaer for year, doen for to do).
  
• The letter 'C' and 'K': These were used interchangeably for the hard 'K' sound (e.g., clene or klene for small).
  
• The 'ghe-' prefix: Where modern Dutch uses ge- for past participles, medieval Flemish heavily favored ghe- (e.g., ghemaect instead of gemaakt for "made").
  
• Merged words: Prepositions and articles were often smashed together, just as people spoke them. Aan het (on the) became ant, and in het (in the) became int.