Biblical Hebrew Forum

["s.a.breyer" <s.a.breyer AT gmail.com>]

Karl -

You wrote (to Randall, but it's my quarrel too!)-

Other than Hebrew, which we are disputing, where can you find an example
where the names of months within a language were exchanged for those
from an outside language without it being either a) the adoption of a
different calendar for whatever reasons and with that adoption the
adoption of the month names from that other calendar, or b) a creole, a
mixture of two languages so that the resulting language is neither one
nor the other language, but a combination of the two, as English is a
combination of medieval French and Anglo-Saxon with French dominating? I
know of none. Can you document any?

- First, what does a new calendar have to do with it? The old Germanic
names which Bede preserves weren't isomorphic with the Christian
(Julian) calendar, but the Englisc were just as capable of transferring
their old names to the new calendar as the Mohammedans, when they
reverted from the lunisolar to the lunar calendar. Modern
Celtic-language calendars (Welsh, Gaelic, Breton) show a mixture of
Latin names and Celtic names related to seasons or pre-Christian
religious festivals (but the Celtic ones may be revivalist inventions).
Basque has Latin names for three months. When the Ottoman Empire adopted
the Julian calendar in 1677 it borrowed three names from Latin and three
from the Jewish calendar, the other six being Ottoman Turkish. German's
been going back and forth for 1200 years: according to Einhard,
Charlemagne "gave the months names in his own tongue [viz. German], in
place of the Latin and barbarous names by which they were formerly known
among the Franks. He called January, Wintarmanoth; February, Hornung;
March, Lentzinmanoth; April, Ostarmanoth; May, Winnemanoth; June,
Brachmanoth; July, Heuvimanoth; August, Aranmanoth; September,
Witumanoth; October, Windumemanoth; Novemher, Herbistmanoth; December,
Heilagmanoth." That is, the Franks adopted Latin and "barbarous" names;
Charlemagne replaced them with invented German names; and those stuck
until the Renaissance and are still in dialectal use. Modern German,
however, has readopted the Latin names, not as the result of calendar
reform or because German is a 'creole' but because those are the names
everybody else has been using (or at least everybody they admire).

- Second, none of this tells us anything reliable about month names in
the spoken language, much less about what the spoken language was. We
don't know what the Englisc called the months or what the Judaeans
called the months, because all we've got is the usage of literary
elites. It's quite possible that outside their respective priesthoods
the Englisc and the Judaeans weren't concerned with months at all; after
all, farmers keep track of seasons, not moons. In Turkish in
agricultural communities folk-calendars with folk-names for months and
seasons are used which have nothing to do with either the Islamic
religious calendar or the Gregorian civil calendar. In the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (a product of second- or third-tier clerics, not world-class
scholars like Bede) there are far more dates of the form "at Michaelmas"
or "nine days before midsummer" than in Latin form, and I suspect that
that's the way most people thought before about 1700. Dates, like times
of day, were low-granularity. If you needed to fix a particular day, say
for paying taxes, you named a feast like Easter and left it to the
experts to let you know when that was rolling around. Month-dating was a
high-tech, specialist notation for those experts - like the Julian Day
today.

- Third, English month names have nothing to do with 'creolization' by
French - the OED gives citations of Latinizing names in Old English
predating the Conquest by two generations. In any case, English is not
and was never "a combination of medieval French and Anglo-Saxon with
French dominating". Scholars debate whether the Scandinavian occupation
had a "creolizing" effect, but it's pretty well agreed that the Conquest
did not. Between 1066 and ca. 1250, only some 1,000 words were borrowed
into English from French; ninety percent of the lexical borrowings
occurred after the language had fully transitioned to Middle English.
Syntactically and morphologically even less was borrowed. 

Stoney Breyer
Writer/TC