Month names collection / metastudy

[Bernd]

Very interesting, I hadn't expected that!
But I think with the broad dating ranges, such graphs can be misleading. How do you handle entries like 'early 14th century' or '15th century'?

I made an alternative graph. Again Octobre in red, Octembre in green, according to your spreadsheet. I used the absolute dating ranges. 'Early' was handled as first quarter of a century, 'Late' as last. Highest scores are at the bottom, worst on top. I omitted different spelling variants like 'October'.

   

We see that Octembre in prominent 1250-1400, but also has a significant number of entries 1400-1500. But those just drown in the vast amount of Octobre entries for this time period. While Octobre is scarce pre-1400. So while Octembre loses significance at later dates percentage-wise, the absolute number isn't that much lower until 1500. The problem lies within a large number of samples of both month name variants that are just dated '15th century'.

But I think even with the abysmal date ranges we have to deal with, it's fair to say that Octembre clusters around an earlier time period that Octobre, mainly the early 15th century, and disappears post-1500. How much this is sampling bias as Koen indicates is another question. We'd have to collect all instances of those variants regardless of their score of other month names. Maybe with enough samples we could find a regional trend?