Month names collection / metastudy

[eggyk]

I wanted to talk about some analysis that's in its infancy, which I dabbled in a while ago before getting sidetracked by other projects. I've made a little list maker that allows me to plot points on a map based on a search criteria. The map only works for places, so only entries that are somewhat reliably located to a specific place or area work for this right now. Any place that is just the country and ? aren't plotted here, including common 'France N', 'Germany S' etc. 

The string is a wildcard, meaning searching for "gst" in the august category will provide a list of locations that contain "gst" anywhere within the month name (augst, ougst, ogst, ougst, augstmond etc), along with how many times a particular place matches. 

For example, here are the (certain) places that contain 'gst' in august, and the places that contain 'aoust', showing a clear france / germany split as expected:
'gst'                                                                                             'aoust'
       

Checking for forms of march with 'me' vs 'mars', showing a similar expected split:
'me'                                                                                             'mars'
       

Then we can check variants within a language, such as 'auril' vs 'apuril',  and 'octobre' vs 'octembre':
'auril'                                                                                         'apuril'
       
'octobre'                                                                                      'octembre'
       

We can also check rarer variants, such as 'march', which shows clearly it was used in northern france and belgium, near to the common crossing points with england. Makes sense. 
'march'                                                                                         
   

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Another month name was more enlightening than I believed at first: may. Yes, 'may' was used almost everywhere in latin, french and german, so isn't useful for localisation etc etc. However, tracking the usage of 'me' instead of 'ma' for may (mey, mei, meye, meymonat), you get a nice plot of entries. It's not clear from the left image perhaps, but if I overlay the Rhine and Main rivers, the picture becomes way more interesting:

(the amazing river overlay taken from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
       

I can't say for sure, but it's possible that there was some language transfer along the rhine, which could be an interesting hypothesis for why there is a mixing of language. We do see some other weaker links too, such as the common dutch "slachtmaent" for november. It appears once as "slachmont" in basel, but also as a similar form in Cologne once, and as december a few times in cologne and strasbourg. One of the aberils actually also happens to have "schlachmanat" for november too. Here is a search for 'ach' in november: