Month names collection / metastudy

[Koen G]

Time for the yearly yong - yony discussion 

It's absolutely, 100% "yong". Arguments:

* The initial "y" is different.
* compare to "g" in "augst" (this is much more cramped, so it's harder to tell the crossbar apart from the minims)
* This was a common way of writing "g"
* "ng" ending for the month is not strange at all

In other words, it behaves more like "g" than like "y" in this hand. It looks like "g" in similar hands. And -ng ending is expected (check eggyk's added block).

[eggyk]

Yes, the g certainly shares the same shape as the g in augst, and is markedly different to both y's at the end of the mays. 

Part of me does consider whether it could be "yoing" instead of "yong", with the right side of an N and left side of the g overlapping. I don't think so, though. The only other n we have is that in novebre, which is quite different as it is at the word beginning. 

 initial "y" is absent from our sample. We have ignored this mostly, but it may be relevant.

Yes, there was one yuing and yulet from belgium I posted somewhere else in this thread I think. 

There is also another part entry You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that I did not add to the spreadsheet which includes a y: 

auril, may, yuing, jule, ougst, octobre, decembre

Once again, a hit in NW belgium (bruges). Again notable because of a mix of french names, a y in yuing, along with the dutch "ougst", very similar to "augst".

[Koen G]

Thanks! I got around to adding both entries. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I also added a second sheet with some explanation about the color codes and which features we're looking for in each month. More intended as a loose guide and "justification" rather than fixed rules. I introduced a blueish color to mark interesting features in otherwise incomplete sequences. 

If the "y = Flemish" hypothesis holds, this potentially has unexpected consequences for the month name writer's origin. It's also a bit annoying for me because we are approaching my home region. With several people's Voynich theories being nationalistically motivated, I would have hoped the thing to stay away from here :p

Anyway, keep 'em coming, and don't hesitate to add potentially relevant incomplete sequences now as well.

[eggyk]

Great changes! I'll try to get around to adding the ones I haven't done yet   

There are certainly many instances of incomplete sequences. I have got to the point now where non-found full calendars/almanacs are rare to come across in the sources I have. The next area i'm trying to search is within chronicles or the telling of history. ("on the 5th day of the month of june in the year 1350 the king of england visited and then he left on the first day of july"). Many were written far far later, so finding such chronicles from pre ~1550AD is of more interest. 

Even if they contain great matches for some months, there is a high chance of producing incomplete sequences as only the relevant month names are written. Also, the amount of work to sift through the texts is magnitudes higher. However, handwritten chronicles are probably more likely to contain vernacular/non-latin or abbreviated month names compared to headers in calendars. 


Seperately, I have been interested in the spelling "aougst". It almost appears to me to be a mix of french aoust and dutch ougst, which is the sort of blending we might be trying to find. It appears on the spreadsheet once already, but actually provides a decent amount of hits on the Munchener Library, with authors like Jacob van Wesenbeeck representing (imo) a plausible type of person who could have wrote these names. Someone who published and spoke in both french and dutch (and low saxon?), with an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. stating of one of his works: 

In the same year this work was also published in french, under the title: La description de l'Etat, Succes et faic de la Religion. Imprimé en Aougst 1569. Both of these editions are very rare. 
...
In 1616, the dutch edition was already so unknown to a new publisher that they had the french edition transferred into [dutch]. It was also not agreed whether the work was originally written in [low saxon / low german] or french. Only later was it discovered that they appeared at the same time. 

 I do also wonder, could belgium/antwerp also be a potential link to aberil, given the eighty years war and the spanish takeover in the late 16th century?

[Koen G]

I'd be careful with venturing too far beyond ca. 1500, especially when it comes to explanatory influences. The script still rings somewhat medieval, although it's certainly later than 116v. 

The form "abseil" "aberil" is still a mystery to me. Maybe this person was writing what they thing words should be written like in French, without actual training in French writing. Or something along those lines.

[eggyk]

Abseil? What is that from? 

But yeah, really i'm just looking for any other type of work that tends to include month names. History books/chronicles written in the 15th century seem to use their own words for the months. For example, I found a few of the same chronicle reprinted over a century or so, and the month names evolved with the text, so I assume that the usage in that context is the author's genuine usage. 

Or some other type of work like the Shephards Kalendar, which seems to be have had multiple editions/reprints, where the months change slightly between editions.  

janyuer feueryere marche aperyll may june julij auguste september october nouember dessember (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
january february marche apryll maye june july august septembre october november decembre (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
januarie februarie march aprill may june july august september october november december (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

None are these particularly relevant to the VMS or the spreadsheet (other than kinda aperyll) but its these types of works i'm looking for, as they may hold some clues to common word usage. It also can be helpful for gauging the consistency within a single document; many of the above vary in spelling within the same document, like 're' vs 'er', 'aperyll' and 'aperell'. 

Later collations of correspondance is way way more difficult to make sure its genuine. Sometimes the text is transcribed exactly as it was written in the original correspondance, and sometimes it is not so they should be used with caution. If anyone knows of other types of documents where month names were commonly written within the bulk of the text, please let me know.

[Koen G]

I meant "aberil" but it got changed to "abseil". I should just never post from my phone anymore, damn autocorrect   

I am also of the opinion that typed-out transcriptions should be used with caution and confirmed when possible. In almost all cases, it's a tradeoff between searchability and reliability. On the other hand, I assume material keeps being digitized and made more accessible, so these keyword searches in scanned books may still turn up relevant leads that weren't there 10 years ago.

We'd probably learn a lot if BNF had some kind of full-text search like MDZ (digitale-zammlungen) has.

[oshfdk]

If these labels are written according to the usual spelling of some actual language/dialect, is there anything we can say about this language? This looks like a Romance language, however many languages seem to accept Roman month names (like in English or German), while not being Romance languages at all, so I suppose we can't really say anything about in which language the person who wrote these month names intended to write them?

Assuming for a moment that the language of the labels is related to the hypothetical plaintext language of the manuscript, do the labels put any restrictions at all on which plaintext languages we should consider?

[MarcoP]

I would say that Italian and Latin can be excluded

[eggyk]

If these labels are written according to the usual spelling of some actual language/dialect, is there anything we can say about this language? This looks like a Romance language, however many languages seem to accept Roman month names (like in English or German), while not being Romance languages at all, so I suppose we can't really say anything about in which language the person who wrote these month names intended to write them?

Assuming for a moment that the language or the labels is related to the hypothetical plaintext language of the manuscript, do the labels put any restrictions at all on which plaintext languages we should consider?

IF they were connected, a very big IF, 

-The plaintext language would likely be a traditionally latin script language (why write in your non-native script for a note?)

-You could say that the plaintext may include the use of contractions (as we have 'ē' for 'em'). 

-Languages such as english are possible, as although it is structurally germanic, many (most?) nouns and adjectives tend to be french/latin descended in some way. 

-If the labels are connected, but the spelling is not usual, the VMS text may contain many spelling variations.

-If the VMS text IS the language of the month names, it is clearly not Latin. 

In my opinion, the VMS month names strike me as either a mix of vocabularies, or from a dialect that itself comes from a mix of cultures and vocabularies. The former is not totally unusual; I have found instances of a stray "juing, juillet" in an otherwise latin calendar, and instances of a stray "Marcius, Aprilis" in germanic calendars. For the latter, these very uncommon dialects only appear to be written down very rarely. This would make sense in a place like the low countries, where perhaps latin, french and standard dutch were the widely accepted vessel for written communication. 
Even in the area that I live in the netherlands, the low saxon dialects are still almost totally shunned in written text. I've basically only ever heard it be spoken by the older population. It was actually quite funny when I first moved here, because I had no idea it existed until someone spoke it at me unsuccessfully. But I'm straying off topic. 

None of what I'm saying here is certain in any way. Perhaps an foreign author speaking hebrew or greek tried to write their month names in latin script, or write the local dialectal names as best as they could? Perhaps a local author tried to write the dialectal names for a client who lacked education in the proper languages of the time, which is apparently what the anglo-norman poem art de kalender did. 

We can't rule out any language based on the month names alone, I don't think. Unless we have reason to believe they are the same language as the VMS text.