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“Les Très Riches Heures” |
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May |
Here’s today’s date in over 400 languages. I’m
favoring those that are at least a bit off the beaten track,
offer Gregorian calendar terms that depart substantially from your
run-of-the-mill neo-Latin, or both. Accordingly you won’t find French,
Chinese, or Persian, say, but rather Picard, Manipuri, and Pashto. (Cool
looking numerals are, naturally, an added plus.)
Sliding your mouse over each language’s name will reveal
its pedigree. Brown terms in parentheses ( ) are alternate names for them, while those in
brackets [ ] specify a
particular subdivision or dialect shown. A curly braced question
{?} indicates some uncertainty about the word.
One of the surprises here is how many non-European languages have
Gregorian date terminology like this to dust off, at least for the record,
even as their underlying cultures stand foursquare behind
Islamic (Hijri), Hindu, Buddhist, or other more localized calendar systems.
For those languages that expired before the advent of modern place-value numerals
I’m using Roman. For Etruscan I’m using Etruscan numerals (basically Roman
except that they used a lambda for 5) while pretending that those serene, elbow-lounging
folks used the Gregorian calendar and reckoned dates sequentially as we do. Traditional
Chuvash numerals follow a similar scheme, but with the smaller units to the left of
the larger ones, a slash for 5, and a star for 1000. Mokshan resembles Chuvash but
uses that lambda for 10 and a kind of reflected sawhorse for 1000.
The only non-Gregorian date I’m showing is an estimate for the Gaulish, whose
calendar was offset by about half a month from that used by their Roman contemporaries
and whose months alternated between 29 and 30 days as opposed to 30 and 31.
For the sake of uniformity the program writes everything out in the continental fashion of
date, month name, and year.
(Classical Latin,
a special case at least by modern standards,
is here.)
It’s likely some languages might
require inflectional modifications on the month names or other refinements, so just let me know and
I’ll incorporate them.
Peter
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Special thanks to:
Can Dai Quang (Cham);
Ansuharijaz (Frankish and Proto-Germanic reconstructions);
Yusuf B. Gursey (Himyarite);
Qinglian Zhao (Naxi);
Lin Ying-Chin (Pumi, Qiang and Rgyalrong);
Apay Tang (Truku dialect of Seediq);
Le Projet Babel (Vosgien);
Eliza Jones, James Kari, Mildred Buck, plus others of the Alaska Native Language Center (some of the least-spoken Athabaskan languages);
Michael Krauss and Marie Smith Jones (Eyak)
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(din ha)
