Month names collection / metastudy

[eggyk]

I did some digging on Gallica for octembre post 1500 to see if we can get any info on how long its usage spanned. 
A decently sized amount were from the 1200s, the majority were from the 1300s, and a great many were from the 1400s, roughly as expected from our current results. Post 1500, I found 2 mentions of octembre in 1507 (2nd hand),  one from 1589 (2nd hand), one from 1641 (2nd hand). Then, kinda weirdly, the next time that you see octembre is a flurry of them in newspapers between 1889 and 1940. I don't know what to make of that.

Sources: 
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Given the interest in "De re Militari" in another thread, I thought it would be worth mentioning an entry that contains the old french translation of the text with an incomplete yet somewhat ineresting sequence.

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1340AD (copied from late 13thC writer "Jean de Meung", who was supposedly the one to translate it from latin)

mars, _ , may*, ioing, _ , _ , septēbre, octembre, nouēbre, _

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These contemporaneous manuscripts seem to have almost the exact style of writing for the months, and may have been copies of eachother.

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1401-1425
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1410-1420

I only realised this where the J in each jullet joins up exactly the same in both and looks like a Y in both. This raises the question of whether many of these entries are truly representative of the scribe's usage, or if scribes commonly copied templates without changing them. This could apply to the 'o' in joing and the 'em" in octembre as well. 

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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.

Does Feller's explanation make sense? If there is a lack of familiarity with the standard spelling form, why would someone write "embre" for something that sounds like "obre"? Not to mention that the many entries (and the VMS itself) have octēbre, not octembre. If a scribe was educated enough to understand and use contractions, they were surely educated enough to have heard Octobre or October.

Actually, now that I think about it, surely the professional writers creating these expensive, luxurious books of hours were amongst some of the most highly educated and highly trained people in europe?

I honestly believe that octembre was a legitimate and commonly spoken variant, if not the most common at some stage. The alternative is that all of these examples using "octembre" in various contexts (many from important and educated people) were all unfamiliar with the standard form, which seems unlikely. 

This You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from 1855 says of Octobre: "This month, called octembre in the manuscripts of the 14th century, was the eighth month of the martial year; despite its name, it's the 10th month of ours"