Month names collection / metastudy

[Koen G]

Very promising!, but of course now what about the 'b' in Aberil?
I once read that this could have been used in Luxemburg (which was quite a bit larger then), but I have not seen that appearing in discussions here.

The "b" in Aberil is more easily found in German sources, sometimes paired with "augst". I wonder, and this is just me speculating, if the MHG tendency to devoice b > p may be at play here. Blut, Brot, Bock turn into Plut, Prot, Pock. And a certain Diebold/Diepold can't decide on how to spell his name. 

If so, spelling "aberil" may be a form of hypercorrection: the writer knows or senses that he tends to change b > p in his dialect, so he unnecessarily "corrects" aperil to aberil. This would be along the lines of what happened to "octembre", which Jules Feller also describes as an unnecessary alteration stemming from lack of familiarity with the standard form.

That said, for me the question remains open on whether this was someone striving to write French or simply someone writing the month names as they understood them in their own dialect. With what we learned recently, and taking into account the unattested mess that the whole series is, the hypercorrection angle is certainly growing on me.

If the month name writer was attempting to write in a language they didn't fully master, would the implication be that they weren't writing for themselves?