A month ago, I spoke with a friend who is involved in a project to create the Interslavic language – another attempt to create a common Slavic language that is understandable to speakers of any of the languages of the Slavic group without additional training. In conversation, he strongly complained about the mess in the names of months in different Slavic languages. Of course, I checked it and found complete insanity (in the table below I tried to color groups of names formed from a common root or at least by the same principle).
In Russian and Serbian (as well as some Polish), Latin names are used (dating back to the Roman calendar), so everything is simple here. In other cases, the etymology has mainly weather (студень = cold, лютый = fierce), natural (листопад = leaf fall, цветень = pollen, травень = grass) and agricultural (гроздобер = picking grapes, серпень = sickle, житар = harvest) roots, and since, depending on the climate, such natural processes occur in different places at different times, the spread of one name on the calendar can be quite large: Macedonian студен is November, and Belarusian студзень is January.
Autumn names орач, руен (Bulgarian), rujan (Croatian), září, říjen (Czech) supposedly indicate the roar of a deer during the rutting season. Of the unique names, my attention was drawn by the Macedonian name of January коложег, supposedly dating back to the Albanian djegqerrës, the month of burning carts; it should not be confused with the Croatian kolovoz (August), the month of transportation of mown grain. The Czech name of February Únor is presumably related to the “diving” of ice on rivers; the Slovenian roznic (June) is borrowed from the German Rosenmonat, the month of roses blooming, and the Croatian veljača (February) and ozujak (March) mean, according to some sources, respectively, changeable and deceptive.
I definitely should check calendars of German languages later as well, everything is obviously not so simple there either (the Saxon name for January is Wulf-monath, “wolf month”).
jbbartram-illu
dededos
yousharknotpass
janainaart
kaledo-art
stormborns
