Month names collection / metastudy

[eggyk]

I'm afraid there's not much hope to further narrow down spelling variants to specific places or time-frames as I had hoped. Since we have a lot of latinized month name variants from South German speaking regions - do you think the Picard hypothesis is obsolete?

It might well be that the VMS sequence is a mixed sequence written by someone both fluent in a NE french dialect and a southern german dialect. We know they mixed latin and german, so it's possible we will find instances where a single scribe used both sets in a work. Another line of evidence for this would be the close proximity of the 2 dialects, or evidence of works (even seperate works) from the same region containing all of the building blocks for the VMS names. That would make it plausible that someone there could have used both. 

As for spelling variants and narrowing down places, you certainly can narrow it down. There are general patterns -or rules of thumb- that have a stronger effect than the inconsistency of a single scribe. For example, if you take augsburg and draw a N/S line as a "border", I would say that abrel is more common the more west you go (most common in swabia and constance), and abril was more common to the east. There's huge overlap of course, but I would say that there's definitely information to be gleaned. 

There are some correlations across sequences too; if we can find enough aberils and aberels we can look for commonalities in the remaining months and then extrapolate a location. Let's say that we hypothetically find more aberils, no available location, but most of those aberil sequences contain 'ernemant' for july, or something like "fulmant" for september, we could quite confidently say the aberils are very likely from the Rheinfranken region, for example. If they happen to contain "st andreis maint" we will know it was somewhere near Cologne.