dead romans

Question: have you ever given any thought to where the names of our months come from?

I hope the answer is "no", because if you have considered this, you've probably concluded that the time you spent was sadly wasted. Or at least, that's my feeling about it. 

Hmmm ... perhaps I should throw in a disclaimer here. What I'm about to say definitely doesn't score highly on the 'most important issues facing our world today' scale. In fact it's been barred from that scale, and invited to participate instead in the slightly less prestigious 2012 "Why the Hell would anyone give this so much as a passing thought?" online poll, viewable at www.crackpot-blogger.com.

But y'know, I'm like that. I'll give a passing thought to almost anything – and then write a couple of thousand words about it!

Anyway ... what I wanted to say is that, for some reason, I find the long list of Roman gods and Emperors on our calendar a little dull and unsatisfying, when you compare them to what else is out there. 

Not a biggie, I know. I just think we could do better. 

Heck, even naming all the months after your relatives would be an improvement ... which, as it happens, is what the now-deceased former president of Turkmenistan did. He renamed the month of April Gorbansoltan after his mother, decreeing at the same time that this should also be the new word for "bread". Exactly why he wanted Turkmeni citizens to put his mum into a clay oven for a few hours, then slap her on a bench and fill her with the contents of a doner kebab, is one of the great mysteries the president took with him to his grave. An enigmatic bunch, these Central Asian leaders ...

But y'know, while that may have been silly, at least it was audacious and kinda original.

Our system does have an upside, though, in that it's shared among quite a number of languages. The calendar as we know it predominates both in Western Europe and in her former colonial territories, as far away as Papua New Guinea (and Australia of course). This means twelve less things to remember if you're learning, say, French (which has Janvier, Fevrier, Mars etc ...), German (Januar, Februar and so on ...), Norwegian (exactly the same as German), Romanian (Ianuarie, Februarie, Martie ...), or almost any other continental tongue. Even Turkish has echoes of the system, with Mart, Mayis and Ağustos all making appearances.

But in case you're thinking this is mainly a Germanic and Roman/Latin affair – with a bit of spillage into surrounding areas and occupied territories – let's indulge in a little tangent to consider the pleasantly weird Magyar (Hungarian) language for a moment.

Magyar is one of Europe's great linguistic oddities, and therefore well worth considering for its own sake. For a start, if you go looking for its closest relatives, you won't find them anywhere on da Continent. In fact, they're thousands of kms away in the autonomous Khanti-Mansy district of western Siberia. Pretty impressively obscure, no? And for a language nerd like me, this sort of isolation – coupled with Magyar's utter dissimilarity to every single one of its neighbours – makes it rather interesting.

So let's continue ... if only to humour me, your slightly creepy but eternally grateful virtual host.

Up for it? Ok, cool.

Magyar was originally written using runes, but now Roman letters are used, augmented by lots of comical squiggly hats. (They're more correctly known as 'diacritics', but I prefer my term.) It features some admirably weird syntax, which you can see in some of its question/answer structures. For example, if a doctor visits you at your house in Budapest, and after the consultation you want to find out if s/he's still there, you don't ask "Has the doctor gone?", or "Doctor went out?". Instead you ask "Away went the doctor?". And you don't answer "Yes"; you answer "Away."*

Let's consider that in dialogue form:

"Away went the doctor?"
"Away, away."

It's almost poetry, isn't it?

And this is pretty typical of how Magyar sounds to the foreigner.

Anyone who's tried to learn it also knows about the highly agglutinative structure** of Magyar, which allows for the construction of wonderfully outlandish words like megszentségteleníthetetlensígeskedései (meaning sth like "people doing things which make it nearly impossible for something to be desecrated"). But that's just one tiny aspect of a rich lexicon, which contains two words for "red", a single word for "the monotonous nature of the learning process", four levels of politeness with different verb choices for each level (something normally associated with Far Eastern languages), a fossilised smorgasbord of old Turkic loan words connected with horseriding, and an endless selection of kinship terms like Ősnagyapa, which translates rather brilliantly as "great great great great great great great great great great grandfather".

And yet, amongst all of this lavish lexical content, there's no verb "to have". You literally can't say "I have a toy squid" in Magyar. To grasp the oddness of that, monitor one hour of pub conversation between yourself and some friends, and then delete all the parts of that conversation which would've been impossible if the word "have" wasn't available to English-speakers. You'll probably find that what you're left with is quite fragmentary ... just little shards of disjointed chat, with an uncomfortable lack of intelligibility or resolution.    

So yeah ... the point (insofar as I have one) is that while staying within the bounds of Europe, Magyar is one of the most 'foreign' languages you can run into. Pretty much everything about it is organised differently to what we've come to expect of European languages. Which leads me to the question: what are their months called? Surely they've got some weird and wonderful system, haven't they?

Errrrr ... well, no. They have január, február, március, április and so on, like everyone else.

To me, this is a tiny bit disappointing.

If you delve back into history a bit, you find that Magyar used to have some wild names for months, like "Boldog Asszony hava" ("Month of the Bountiful Queen", a reference to a prominent goddess in Hungarian pagan myths, who women used to pray to during childbirth). But they ditched all of that some time ago, in favour of the same old Dead Gods and Emperors that we all know. Good news for the aspiring Euro-polyglot, of course, but a shame for anyone who enjoys the 'surprise factor' of learning a foreign language.

Luckily, though, there are some European cultures that have gone their own way in labelling their calendars. And thank the (non-Roman) gods that they have! I mean, there are simply loads of things to name your months after, if you can be bothered to show some imagination.

A case in point is Finnish (which has so many cool features that I just can't stop using it as an example). The Finns call March maaliskuu, roughly translated as "earthy month". It got its name because, during maaliskuu, you get the first glimpses of earth as it begins to emerge from underneath the winter snows. Similarly, February is helmikuu, meaning "month of pearls", because the little ice droplets that form on trees in February are reminiscent of tiny pearls.

Great, isn't it?

October, on the other hand, is rather less romantically known as lokakuu, "the month of mud". Oh well ... can't win them all.

Over in the Slavic world, meanwhile, I stumbled onto a great example a few years ago. Soon after I first came to Ukraine, I was surprised to discover that the Ukrainian names for months bore no relation at all to the Russian ones, and that it used an entirely different system.

Why the surprise? Well, because the two languages are intimately related. Lots of 'basic terms' are almost the same, which makes those particular Ukrainian words easy to learn if you already know the Russian ones.

By way of example, here are the numbers one to six:

Russian       Ukrainian
a-din               o-den
dva                  dva
tri                     tre
ch'-tә-ri           cho-te-ri
pyet'                 pet'
shest'                shist'

... see what I mean?**** 

I expected that a comparative list of months would look like this as well – i.e. almost the same, with a few odd vowel substitutions. And since Russian is a member of the Dead Gods and Emperors Club (with Janvar, Fevral, Mart etc.), I was therefore ready to meet another variation on the same old theme ... until I encountered the Ukrainian word for December, which is "Hruden" (груден).

That just threw me completely.

Not only was I surprised by its dissimilarity to Russian декябрь (Dekyabr, "December"), but its resemblance to another Russian term was ... erm, how can I put this? Striking? Yeah, that's probably the word I'm looking for.

See, Ukrainian груден looks an awful lot like an adverbial or plural form of the Russian word грудь (pronounced "grud"), which means "breast". Could that really be a month name? I mean, could the Ukrainian calendar really end with "a month of breasts"? And if so, exactly how would that be celebrated?

Unfortunately, it wasn't so. If you look up "Ukrainian month names" on the internet, you'll find something entirely non-breast-related. Груден is in fact listed as "the month of frozen clods" – a reference to the fact that the earth beneath your feet is all frozen in December.

And I had such high hopes for my "month of breasts" :-( 

Oh well ...

Anyway, I've since found out three things that are relevant to this train of thought. First, other Ukrainian months are also named after natural phenomena (so now, for example, we're in Berezn*****, "the month of birch trees", and this will soon give way to Kviten, "the month of flowering").

Secondly, Ukrainian shares this system with a number of other Slavic languages such as Czech and Serbo-Croat (though in Croat, March is Ožujak, "the lying month" – I'd love to know where that came from!).

In fact the only reason I didn't realise this sooner is because the first Slavic language I had contact with was Russian, which turns out to be the oddball of the family in many respects. When you go south and west of Russia, you find that its linguistic cousins are more adventurous with their calendars. In fact, there's even a month in Czech (Zari = September) which has been etymologically traced to the time of year when male deer most want to ...

*ahem*

(trying to find a polite way to express it)

... let's say when they want to, er, "get intimate with the lady-folk".

Don't know 'bout you, but for me, naming a month "The deer would really like to have copious amounts of sex now" is way, way, WAY more interesting than "Month of Julius, The Misshapen Despotic Tyrant Who Currently Collects Our Taxes".  

Apologies to any Romanophiles who may be reading.
(You know who you are!)

Oh, and I almost forgot the third thing. Apparently, I'm far from being the first person in Ukraine to notice the hruden = russian tits thing. And by "far", I mean "centuries distant". I'm told there have been silly jokes about it here since time immemorial. 

So there you go.

Of course, as soon as you head outside the Eurosphere, the whole calendar-naming thing opens up even more. On one end of the scale, you've got languages like Korean and Mongolian, whose month names literally mean "First Month", "Second Month" and so on (though Mongolians also have individual names for years, and the year which began on Feb 19 1996 is called "Fire Mouse". I do love that one! Seems to me there's a post-modern super hero there, just crying out to be created.)

Then there are lots of names that relate fairly directly to seasonal processes and food sources, like Chinese "Meiyue" (plum ripens) and "Layue" (preserved meat month – some time around December).

On yet another ridiculous tangent, what I find most entertaining about "Layue" is that the "yue" part seems to mean "month". If that's right, and if you assume the other part of the word has the same meaning outside of this context (which of course you often can't), it means that "la" is "preserved meat" in Chinese. I really hope that's true! It just tickles me to think of Chinese people raising an eyebrow the first time they hear a Western pop song in which the singer suddenly starts going "Preserved meat-preserved meat-preserved meat-preserved meat" at the end.

Sorry. Bad brain.

Finally, there are the month names which seem totally obscure to the Westerner. They're probably my favourites.

A nice example comes from Sesotho (the majority language of Lesotho in Southern Africa). They have some really cool month names, all of which are perfectly explicable in the context of the culture. They're related to nature and food supply, like a lot of the Slavic ones ... and yet at first glance, through a foreigner's eyes, they're just utterly weird. For example, in Lesotho February is known as Hlakola, which means "wipe it off". (Wtf?). April, meanwhile, is called Mmesa, meaning the "the roaster", and Motsheanong (May) is a contraction of a phrase that translates as "one who laughs at birds".

You have to love that, for sheer out-of-the-blueness.

Still, as I said, all of these can be explained. The laughing at birds thing is a reference to sorghum grain (something like millet), which is an important part of the Sotho people's diet. The grain becomes so hard and stony in May that birds, try as they might, can't eat it. So in the people's imagination, their sorghum plants are sitting out there in the fields for a whole month going "HAAA-haaa ... can't get me now, you dumbass birds!"

Hlakola (Feb) is also sorghum-related, because that's the time when sorghum plants produce a kind of sticky covering that needs to be wiped off if you want them to grow to their full potential. And the "roaster" thing for April ... well, if I say "sorghum", you can probably guess.

Lastly, going back to Chinese, perhaps one of the most fabulous month names I've come across is "Liangyue", which falls some time around October. It literally translates as "good month", and that's it. Nothing fancy – just good. And why? Well, to tell you the truth I haven't the faintest idea.

I suspect there are more than a few wizened historians kicking around who could enlighten us about the origins of "Liangyue", and no doubt it would be quite interesting to hear. And yet, personally I'd rather remain ignorant on this one ... it's much more fun just to try and guess! I mean, imagine you're a high-ranking member of a Chinese imperial dynasty, way back in antiquity. At some point, you have such an utterly fabulous time in October that you decide to promote the idea of calling it "good month" from that point onwards. The obvious question then becomes: what did you do for a whole month that was so damn good?

Whatever the truth may be, it probably isn't as entertaining (or possibly as debauched) as what's going through your mind right now. So I say let's leave that one up to the imagination :-)

Speaking of imagination, though, the original point of this rather silly entry was my being not-so-impressed with the 'Dead Gods and Emperors' system. It falls far short of what we could have on our calendar if we really put our minds to it. And for this reason, I'm handing it over to you. Your task: come up with new month names, and post them here along with brief explanations of each.

Actually I'm inclined to make this something like a competition ... so to fill my end of the bargain, let me offer some prizes. The person who comes up with the best month names will get a fabulous sample of genuine Ukrainian currency (generally unavailable in the outside world), featuring the faces of people who have made a real difference, often in subtle defiance of a nearby superpower.

You'll also get some genuine Ukrainian konfetki, which taste exactly like the chocolates your nan used to offer you out of weirdly-sculpted green glass bowls when you were a kid. Believe me, they're worth competing for!

So, how's about it then? Care to venture a more interesting calendrical system than the one we've got now? Go on ... I'm sure
you can! 

Meanwhile, take care and live well )))

Anthony.


* I got this from the following website, which contains an interesting article called "Hungarian: A Strange Cake on The Menu":  http://www.filolog.com/languageStrangeCake.html

** Agglutination means sticking affixes on a word to modify or add to its meaning. We do it in English, of course, as in 'lick -- licking -- lickable'. But highly agglutinative languages do it more. To increase the complexity of a message, instead of adding more words you add more affixes, creating sort of 'mega-words'. For example, in English we can take a word like "bring" and use it to build the phrase "I bring them", by adding a subject and an object. In Euskara***, which has loads more agglutination, you'd start with "kar" (the root of the verb "to bring"), add "da" at the front (to show present tense), then put "tza" (plural object) after the root, and finish off with "-t" (subject - in this case standing in for "I"). So you'd end up with one word, "dakartzat", containing a whole phrase within it. That's agglutination for ya. Pretty intense, isn't it?

*** The language of the Basque peoples in southern France and Northern Spain. It's another one of those oddities ... no-one is quite sure where it came from. There was a wonderful theory that it was related to the language of the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. That would've made the ancient languages of northern Spain and northern Japan close cousins, with no other related languages in the huge geographical area lying between them. How intriguing that would have been! Unfortunately, the theory has been more or less disproven. Shame.

**** These transliterations aren't 100% accurate, but they're as good as I can make them, given the huge differences between Slavic and English vowel sounds.

***** One source I looked at claimed that the Czech "brezen" (March) – for which the most obvious translation is "birch trees" – is actually a reference to getting pregnant. So I guess there are a lot of Sagittarians and Capricorns in the Czech Republic ;-)