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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Polish month names
Message-ID: <Cxy7Fx.56I@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <1994Oct19.145249.29386@chemabs.uucp>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 01:43:09 GMT
Lines: 22

In article <1994Oct19.145249.29386@chemabs.uucp>,  <rmt51@cas.org> wrote:
>
>The strange thing here is that Polish listopad = November and Croatian
>listopad = October.  Listopad means "the month when the leaves fall,"
>and one would expect the leaves to fall earlier in Poland, which is
>further north than Croatia.

Maybe an explanation can be that in the first part of the year, things
like grass, flowers and linden-trees start to bloom earlier in the South.
The harvest (sierpien'/srpanj) is also earlier in the South.  For the last
couple of months, the "canonical order" of the months takes over.  
Assuming for a moment now (I wouldn't know), that the original system
was the South-Slav, and the West-Slavs shifted, the climatological shift 
up to "sierpien'" would have `dragged along' the series "wrzesien', 
paz'dziernik, listopad, grudzien'", with loss of "*prosiniec".  In Czech,
"prosinec" stayed (being the final in the series and full of holidays 
makes a month resistant to change).  Just a theory...

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
