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Month names collection / metastudy
- Month names collection / metastudy
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RE: Month names collection / metastudy
Zauriek > 25-06-2026, 06:09 PM
(25-06-2026, 01:16 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here we see the clearest example yet of a french+German mix.
Does this mean that in the 1300-1500 when an author knew diferent languages, she/he mixed them up for the month names?
It seems to be at random, like no second thought being made about it; In wich case it does not mean a dialect of french-german but like an interpolation of languages;
what about the text, are french and german words mixed in? i can not read it; if yes, i assume the selecting of words for each language gives piority to important nouns for a language an important verbs for another one.
In case this interpolation is something real, the marginalia month names are not a native natural language but just an evidence of the languages the scriba knew: "iollet" and "aberil" may be from lost dialects learned from somewhere at some point.
Not sure how this german-french mix works in the ms (Staatsbibliothek Bamberg Msc.Med.22) besides the month names, if it can be labeled as a new sintaxis or just a selective use of diferent words of diferent languages; is like how in the marginalia some text has like 2 languages, like voyniches and "german."
*I think im readit all wrong, i apologize in advance (80% sure it is wrong). page: 59r
59v
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RE: Month names collection / metastudy
eggyk > 26-06-2026, 08:39 AM
The language itself is just whichever dialect of german this is, I think. In that part of the manuscript, there is also a Latin paragraph for each month.
Let's take the month of november. Both nouembre and nouember appear alongside the german name, but it's not clear exactly why. Here you can see 'nouembre' as part of the Latin paragraph for november:
And at the bottom of the German paragraph below that, the writer uses 'der november':
As for why they needed to mix the names at all, it's clear that both the latin and the german names were in concurrent use by academics for a long time. This sentence demonstrates this:
"In nouembre, das ist in dem dritten herbstmon..."
"In november, that is in the third autumn month, ..."
The writer felt it necessary to express both names for clarity, perhaps so a larger range of people could understand which month was being discussed. This is very commonly seen in these manuscripts. A modern day example would be something like an british person saying "in the autumn (in the fall) ..." so that Americans would be more likely to understand.
If I were to speculate, these examples may have been "mistakes" when writing the latin names. A "mistake" in the sense that whoever wrote this text was used to writing them in french, so when writing 'nouember', their muscle memory sometimes wrote the almost identical french 'nouembre'? I honestly don't know. -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
Koen G > 26-06-2026, 02:04 PM
(25-06-2026, 01:16 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here we see the clearest example yet of a french+German mix.
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1463AD, Bavaria N, Bamberg?
Original Author: Ortolfus von Würzburg, aka Ortolf von Baierland ca 13thC
Wow, this one is really all over the place. I had a closer look. It's very interesting.
The text includes a Latin paragraph for each month, and this Latin (not French) has an effect on the way the month names are used in the vernacular parts. For example, the ablative form of "September" is "Septembre". So when you want to say "in September" in Latin, you use the ablative form: "in Septembre".
And indeed, the scribe uses the Latin ablative form whenever he says "in month", even in the vernacular.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has "september" in Latin and the vernacular as the subject (nominative)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has "in dem september", which appears to be fully vernacularized. Also cases of "october" in both languages, nominative.
fYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has the Latin ablatives "in septembre" and "in octobre", but used in the vernacular. My guess would be that the scribe sees "in Septembre" as a Latin phrase that can be used in the vernacular.
So long story short: this has nothing to do with French, but it's rather standard scribal showboating with Latin phrases. In the VM, however, we see what must be nominative cases, making French influence the most likely option. -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
Aga Tentakulus > 26-06-2026, 02:45 PM
Yes, I know that book.
But as always, I can't remember where it was.
But there are a lot of month names.
We discussed it once, years ago. That also helped me find something related to the topic.
But when I take a closer look, it's not the same font. I think it's from E-Codies. -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
eggyk > 26-06-2026, 03:00 PM
(26-06-2026, 02:04 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The text includes a Latin paragraph for each month, and this Latin (not French) has an effect on the way the month names are used in the vernacular parts. For example, the ablative form of "September" is "Septembre". So when you want to say "in September" in Latin, you use the ablative form: "in Septembre".
...
So long story short: this has nothing to do with French, but it's rather standard scribal showboating with Latin phrases. In the VM, however, we see what must be nominative cases, making French influence the most likely option.
Aha, that would explain that!
Speaking of all over the place.. at some point we might have to discuss german spelling convention in general. There basically isn't any. It's horribly inconsistent, even for a single scribe. We're looking for a specific spelling variant for these, and we tend to assume that the spelling genuinely represents how they said the words or represents a spelling tradition, but the more that I see these month names the more I doubt that.
There are plenty of instances with e <-> i (both abril and abrel)
The word for month might as well be "mənət" because correct usage for o's, a's, and e's seems to have been optional. I don't understand how a single person can write monad, manad, manet, monod, monet, monot, mont, manot and not realise it's different each time. Maybe some I could see as interchangeable depending on accent (manet/manat), but (manod/monad)? Pick a lane! -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
eggyk > 27-06-2026, 11:41 AM
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1463-1466AD
Germany S, Ravensburg?
mertz
der aberel, ob? der aberelle, in dem aberellen
maÿ
iunio
iulio
der ougst, dē ougsten
september
october
in nouembre, der nouember
december
I will start adding the preceeding word to some future notes in order to understand which case the months are written in and whether scribes kept to the rules. If I have time, I will try to go through the existing april notes and add them there too.
Coincidentally, this manuscript looks really similar to the one that Aga referenced. It was discussed once 6 years ago in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (ty MarcoP for making that searchable) but the month names were not discussed so idk. E-codices is slow today so it's hard to scan through the pages. -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
eggyk > 27-06-2026, 03:16 PM
On a cursary look at some april entries, there seem to be general rules, but they appear to slightly inconsistent. Abrellen/abrillen/aprillen always seems to have 'dem', rarely 'des'. Abrelle/Abrille/abrell/abrill seems to be a slightly different story; there are multiple examples of names ending in 'e' being written as a title, one of which is 'der abrille'. There is also a manuscript that contains 'dem abrill/abrell/abryll'. All instances of 'aberel' have been either a lone title or 'der aberel'.
Honestly, I lack the knowledge to properly analyse medieval German and what these examples mean (beyond noticing patterns), so I will leave that to someone else. This isn't a complete list as I focused first on some entries with 'en' and 'e' endings.
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dem abrellen / dem abrill/dem abryll (32v) / dem abrell (60v) / des abryllen (28v)
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Abrille (alone as chapter title)
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Abrille (alone as title) (21r) / der abrill (21r) / des abrilles (21r)
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der abrille
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dem aprillen / der aprill / der april
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Aberel bin ich... (i actually missed this aberel) / Abrill (title) / dem abrellen
(Apologies for constantly bumping this thread) -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
Koen G > 27-06-2026, 04:52 PM
Do keep bumping the thread, this is one of those I follow with great interest.
For the declension, I'm looking at the wiki: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Latin month names in MHG are usually masculine, but we need to figure out whether they treat it as a strong noun or a weak noun (this can shift).
Heiligenkreuz, Zisterzienserstift, Cod. 339
(in)dem abrellen --> weak, dative
(von) dem abrill/dem abryll --> strong (?) dative. The one that writes abryll may be a different hand? It looks like this folio also has nominative "Abrilis".
dem abrell (60v) --> strong dative
des abryllen (28v) --> weak genitive
So what's going on here? Bernd or others might correct me on this, but what I feel is happening is that "Abril" is simultaneously seen as a loan word and a German word, and it shifts between strong and weak declension, engendering a whole range of options.
This is complex, but for our practical purpose, the conclusion seems clear: whatever comes after the "l" is valid, so abrel, abrell, abrelle and abrellen are equivalent. Luckily, the noun case does not affect what comes before the "l", which is what we're interested in. -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
Bernd > 28-06-2026, 05:47 PM
I'm far from an expert in MHG grammar and I would not have expected 'Abrille' as a standalone title. But yeah, I guess everything is possible. The weak-strong boundary isn't that firm. All those april variants look legit to me in normal German and your declination appears correct to me. No need to treat it as Latin, except 'Aprilis'
Also keep in mind that Bavarian was and is an extremely 'lazy' language with a sloppy and often minimal pronunciation. 'Septembre' and 'September' would be pronounced similarly because the 'e' is largely silent .This would lead to something like 'Sebdemba' in both cases. All april variants would end up like abr - followed by some stretched ü/ö like sound (I'm not good with IPA). The 'Aberel'- versions look more fancy, sophisticated, and the -en endings a bit poetic. We can question why the scribe chose several variants in the same text, but as we all know writing wasn't standardized so why not?
The same goes for your 'monat' variants, though some are pretty weird. The reader would (probably) have understood from context..
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? -
RE: Month names collection / metastudy
Zauriek > 28-06-2026, 08:02 PM
Yep, this research is beyond my lane; These new discoveries feel important.
---------------------------------[A]
Does that month spelling variation only happens with German? maybe it is a phenomenon that is exclusive to the German language of the 1300s-1500s; that is like a clue if it is that narrow.
I tend to misspell "illiterate" as "iletrated" what happens is that i took by instinct the Spanish word "iletrado" and add the English conjugation rules to end up with "iletra-ted" that is a chimera word that does not exist. I was so confident that it was a real word that didn't check it up, maybe something similar happened, a short form of overconfidence from part of the scribe when predicting the existence of a word he didn't know in another language that he/she assumed is an expert in [Or maybe there were a lot of bad learned words within an inner circle of teaching.]
Specially because that doctor was "famous" and the spelling is all over the place: aka: how a prominent figure can do such variations; it points to the normality of the practice too.
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[b]-Hypothesis:
The month marginalia writer was a Dutch user that wrote in Picard French, but he learned French by Latin; he mixed up Dutch with french-latin conjugations to predict certain months and used bad learned words for others, but his/her intention was to write in full Picard French the month names.
I mean the possibility "aberil" and "iollet" as part of a natural language seems to be going down(is still possible tho.)
[/b]