After a good eight months of research, design, and coding, often over 14-hour days, "The Twelve Months of the Year in 850 Languages and Dialects (Mostly Ones You’ve Probably Never Heard Of)" has a fresh, new database. I’ve added many novel entries, hunted up thousands of translations and etymologies, brought in a whopping 70 foreign fonts, beefed up the profiles, and generously replenished its supplementary articles. Correspondingly, here’s my updated "Today’s date" page.
he entries still total 850, though.
The newcomers displaced others whose sources weren’t up to snuff or who just didn’t seem to have as much to say.
You can view the first 16 words of each language’s story below by rolling your cursor over its name Language profile.
Where you see a green lotus blossom () on those sections, rolling over the month terms Translation, etymology, or characterization will reveal their characterizations. 1 They tell us a great deal about what is or was important to their underlying cultures. The book itself has an article in the back, Lingo Factinos I, showing samples of abjads, alphabets, abugidas, syllabaries, and logograms and outlining how they all work.
Lingo Factinos II covers some ancient civilizations you don’t often hear about — in some cases, likely never — and how a weird-sounding alphabet connected to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World recently got deciphered. You’ll also find out what traces some Japanese explorers might have left behind in the Americas, a good century and a half before Columbus.
And what European language standard introduced in 1982 was pooh-poohed as a "test-tube baby" by its opponents.
And where January is called uilal-bailiur, "when pigs go raiding gardens." And on what month, at Malekula Island in Vanuatu, you’d better get ready to pass muster with your local Yam Master. Now in case you haven’t been here for a while, heading terms below in parentheses ( ) are alternate names for a language, while those in brackets [ ] specify a particular subdivision or dialect.
Curly braces { } narrow things down in cases where there are other languages with the same name.
The video screen icon links ( ▭ ) visible on 394 of these entries will let you hear how they actually sound. 2 Here’s Abkhazian, for example, where you get to hear Rapunzel deftly negotiate 65 consonant sounds as she sings Yanbalagwa sa siphsthazaara? (When Will My Life Begin?). Some of these languages are over 1500 years old.
Regardless, they more or less followed along with the Julian calendar 3 to do as the Romans did.
Examples include Etruscan, Tocharian B, Gaulish, and Pahlavi (Middle Persian).
You’ll also see the Palmyrene of Queen Zenobia, who helped herself to several eastern Mediterranean provinces in the late third century when the Romans weren’t looking. Other entries move further into the medieval.
Thirteenth century Yiddish is something you don’t see every day, any more than Gothic (flourished 3rd to 10th century), medieval Georgian (shown in its archaic Asomtavruli script), 14th century Picard (with, in the book, a quote by Da Vinci-like artist Villard de Honnecourt), Pecheneg (mysterious, poorly attested, gone by 1300), Old Udi (gleaned but recently through x-ray scans), or Tangut (notorious for its byzantine, quasi-Chinese writing system). Years shown are Gregorian.
For organizational clarity and consistency, the chart displays each entry in the continental order of day, month, and year even where accompanying scripts read right-to-left. Notes 2.
Some of these don’t necessarily match the dialects, but should give you a pretty good idea.
If you happen across a good quality video I can link to for one or more of these languages yourself, do email it to me using "webmaster" at this domain or through the "Contact me" link below. 3.
Virtually identical to our modern 12-month Gregorian, but with a less accurate leap year system.
I may not yet have all the foreign fonts working on this page (they all work beautifully when *I* look at them because my machine can serve them locally), so do let me know if you see a missing one I need to fix. Thanks.
1.
Terms that just simulate their Neo-Latin equivalents, or operate as ordinals — "first month," "second month," etc.
— don’t need explaining.