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• Month names collection / metastudy

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  eggyk > 28-06-2026, 08:14 PM

  (28-06-2026, 05:47 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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we have a lot of latinized month name variants from South German speaking regions - do you think the Picard hypothesis is obsolete?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.

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  R. Sale > 28-06-2026, 08:20 PM

  Hypothetically, instead of French mixed with German or German mixed with French, how about a mixture of French and German - [MISS] interpreted by a Portuguese. The 1430 marriage of Philip the Good and Isabelle of Portugal would have brought some influences all the way to Burgundian Dijon. Portuguese uses a "b" in Abril. And there's time to spare in the C-14 window. Not to mention any later additions.
  
  Perhaps this is difficult to pin down because the writer wanted to make it that way. Trickery is a difficult topic and easy to dismiss, but there are more examples in the cosmos and the zodiac sequence. While there may be some justification for the disguising of valid medieval memes from contemporaneous medieval people, the modern situation has been that various examples of these historical memes were not known to the VMs investigators. Newbold's Andromeda. Not to mention the fact that certain visual elements clearly were altered in the VMs.
  
  Appearance is altered, but artistic structure remains the same. Two visually altered elements are paired together in the VMs to create a cosmic oxymoron. It's an outstanding bit of trickery. The duality of VMs White Aties was built into the circular structure.  Papelonny canting was constructed in advance. The VMs contains (what is left of) a puzzle that was built on the recognition of various medieval memes and identifying those that best promote further investigation into the VMs.

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  Koen G > 28-06-2026, 08:40 PM

  The way I currently see the evidence for each month:
  
  * Mars: standard French, would be very unusual in German
  * Aberil: not a standard form, but can be expected in Middle High German. Eggy found several examples.
  * May: universal, though German is more likely to have different forms. Not the most useful month name.
  * Yong: too rare to say much about it, but the g-ending suggests French. Based on very sparse evidence, the initial "y" may point towards the French-Middle Dutch border. 
  * iollet: also too rare, but again the llet-ending points towards French
  * augst: hardly found in French, very easy to find in German
  * septembre etc: French. As I explained, the "in septembre" forms are red herrings based on the Latin ablative form. Our month names are nominative forms and the absolute standard for French.
  * octembre: easy to find in northern French dialects.
  
  Ignoring May, that's 7 months towards French, two towards German. Basically, we have to assume "base language influenced by other language". But the base language is almost certainly a broadly northern form of French. We need Germanic influence for aberil and augst.

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  Zauriek > 29-06-2026, 05:33 AM

  By the way; i find very odd that the current best match comes from a French astrolabe. [The first entry with 7.5 score]
  I'm assuming engraving a text requies  a more strict representation of the base language (so, possible variantss were left off.)

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  nablator > 29-06-2026, 08:06 AM

  (29-06-2026, 05:33 AM)Zauriek Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way; i find very odd that the current best match comes from a French astrolabe. [The first entry with 7.5 score]
  I'm assuming engraving a text requies  a more strict representation of the base language (so, possible variantss were left off.)

  
  There was no "strict" (standard) spelling.

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  Zauriek > 29-06-2026, 09:50 AM

  (29-06-2026, 08:06 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There was no "strict" (standard) spelling.

  
  Well yea, but, i refer to overall metal astrolabes; i was wondering if the act of engraving stuff into metal in that time could have required more rigurosity, at least compared with the text in manuscripts. Because if a mistake was made the whole piece had to be remelted? or it would require a predesigned mold to save time (that has to be carefully made.)
  
  Do you think the engravings could have been personalized to the buyer? Not sure if the astrolabes were piled up to be sold (like a mass production of today) or if it had to be a commisioned work made one by one.
  
  Well, in the scenery of an metalic engraving to be sold in a market with people going around, it would require some short of most accepted or easily recognized signatures rater than variations of the official or most used symbolism at the time i imagine. Or the designer and the buyers really do not cared about the discrepancy of picard french in all of the months. Or they could understand them, in wich would made that particular order of month names somewhat standard to the orignin of the piece. But if it was a commision the source would have been the buyer not the crafter.
  
  Anyways is just a sideline idea.
  
  [With "order of month names" i refer to the phenomenon of some months beeing strict and have less disvariance than others, "strict" month names are like "may"? disvariants are like "iollet" i guess]

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  eggyk > 29-06-2026, 10:24 AM

  (29-06-2026, 08:06 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There was no "strict" (standard) spelling.

  
  In german, for sure. But in french? The spellings (for the month names at least) are remarkably consistent across hundreds of manuscripts.
  
  For june, it's basically only ever juing, jung, or rarely joing. You don't really see juung, jang, juinng etc. Although maybe we should actively look for them, now that I think about it.

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  Zauriek > 29-06-2026, 11:04 AM

  (29-06-2026, 10:24 AM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In german, for sure. But in french? The spellings (for the month names at least) are remarkably consistent across hundreds of manuscripts.

  Maybe that is why old german borrowed terminology from the french and latin, they were trying to solidify a standard for month names and then they tried to make their own dutch-like nomenclature by making weird mixes, and with the gradual pass of time, the references were slowly solidifying due popularity referencing until the standard month names in dutch were made or maybe this is bonkers and the final dutch names for months were impossed by a king or something like @R. Sale said. 
  
  Iollet feels like an intentionally twisted french word, like they borrowed juing and decided to declare war on it. Wait, could juing had another meaning in old german, so it could not be used? i don't know, maybe that is why they changed some of the month names, no idea really.
  
  Aberil feels like aberellen + aprilis mix combo: [aberellen + aprilis | aberel + april | abe-ril] In this context the word was made to reference the two languages used for the month, as if there was some kind of need to write a month in more than 1 language for clarification or something.
  
  [i'm a little bit worried by my lack of knowledge in this, hope it is all good.]

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  eggyk > 30-06-2026, 11:20 AM

  Big one. Octembri in a german language MSS!
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  1416-1419AD, Austria, Salzburg
  "Bavarian-Austrian language"
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
                          mertz
                          abrül
                           may
                           juny          / ander may*
                           julÿ           / erst augst 
                       ander aügst
  (des monedes) septembris    /  heribst moned
  (des monedes) octembri       /  regen moneid
  (der kalende)   nouembris     /  winder moneid
          (in dem)  december     /  christ moneid    /   hort moneid   / des (andern tagez ydus) decembris
  
  Notes:
  -regen-month/ hart-month sequence is very rare (only seen 3 times before), on the border regions between germany and austria. All 3 have other forms of april, mostly forms of abril/abrel. 
  
  -abrül seems to also be a Salzburg area thing. I would like someone else to confirm it's not abriil, but i'm more and more confident as the y's and u's are different. In this MSS, it also matches the 'ü' used in aügst.
  
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Is this also a good time to bring up that we don't technically have septēbre in the VMS? We have septēb', and reasonably assume septēbre to match the rest, but it could also be september or septembris, right? IIRC, they are often used interchangably in french works, too (I just never really catalogued them if an 're' or 'er' ending was there).

• RE: Month names collection / metastudy

  Koen G > 30-06-2026, 12:25 PM

  Many interesting findings! Some points:
  
  * In case of doubt, I'd opt for "abriil" over "abrül". At first glance, it looks like the form in "Abriil" is rounder than "ü" elsewhere, which is quite spiky at the bottom. But it's hard to say. Since we're not sure, I'd say "abriil" with its two minims is more neutral. But both are really okay, this has no impact on the scoring system or anything.
  
  * Of the -ris/ri endings, as you probably expect, these are inflected Latin forms again, genitive this time.
  
  * I do not think the VM septēb' can be "septembris", since there is no reason to use a Latin genitive here. The 9 other month names are nominative. I personally don't think we should assume that it develops to anything other than "septembre". Any argument based on another form would be extremely speculative, given the full sequence.
  
  * The most interesting thing is indeed the occurrence of "octembri" here, (which would presumably be "octember" in the nominative). This may be a clean case of what was described in this older source we discussed before: authors writing in the vernacular equalizing the Latin sequence.
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