Introduction
The fact that our solar calendar has months of around 30 days,
as we have seen, is a direct result of the fact that at one point time was
reckoned by the phases of the moon, which are approximately a month in length
(29.5 days). The Roman calendar originally had ten months. The names of the first
four of the original ten Roman months in Latin were derived from the names of Roman
gods and goddesses, perhaps because of their connection to the agricultural cycle.
Actually, the name of one of the months, April, is not as clearly derived from
the name of a god as the other ones are, as we shall see.
The following are the names of those first four
months in the early Roman calendar that consisted of only ten months. Note that
the numbers of the months do not correspond to their current numbers. As we
shall see, two more months were added to the calendar at a later point and
those months were added at the beginning of the year, not at the end, which
resulted in the numbered months to be off by two. The names of these four
months are shortened from phrases containing the noun mēnsis ‘month’, which was later elided. The remaining
parts were originally possessive adjectives. Thus, we find here a case of
ellipsis of the noun in a noun+adjective phrase which resulted in the adjective
being nominalized or becoming a noun.
Month 1: mārtĭus (mēnsis) ‘(month) of Mars’
The first month was
named after the Roman god Mārs (accusative: Mārtem; regular stem: Mārt‑)), the god of war
(cf. Part II, Chapter 21,
§21.3.2).
This god is also the source of the name of one of the days of the week, namely
Lat. mārtis ‘of
Mars’ from where comes the name of the day martes
‘Tuesday’ in Spanish (cf. Part II, Chapter 21).
The possessive adjective mārtĭus
(mārt‑ĭ‑us) ‘Martian,
of Mars’ was derived from the stem mārt‑
of the god’s name and the derivational suffix ‑ĭ‑ that
turned nouns into adjectives, plus the inflectional first declension
inflexional ending ‑us. This
possessive adjective was similar in meaning to the genitive case wordform of
the name Mars, namely mārtis that we just saw. It
is from the word mārtĭus
that that we get the month names Eng. March
~ Sp. marzo.
Sp. marzo is
a patrimonial Spanish word which displays the sound change from Latin ‑tĭ‑ (before another vowel)
to Old Spanish ‑ʦ̪‑ and, then, to Modern Spanish ‑z‑, pronounced [θ]
or [s], depending on the dialect (cf. Part I, Chapters 7, 10, and 11).
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Eng. March
is a loanword from Old French dialectal march(e),
also a patrimonial descendant of mārtĭus
in this language. The more common Old French spelling of this word was marz. In Modern French, it is mars.
In later Roman times, another adjective was derived from the
stem mārt‑ĭ‑
of mārtĭus,
by addition of the third declension adjectival suffix ‑āl‑,
resulting in mārtĭālis
(mārt‑ĭ‑āl‑is)
‘of or belonging to Mars or war’ (because
it is a third declension suffix, it takes the nominative inflection ‑is‑, which is both masculine and
feminine, cf. Part I, Chapter 8). This is the source of Eng. martial /ˈmaɹ.ʃəl/ ~ Sp. marcial /maɾ.ˈθi̯al/, as in Eng. martial law ~ Sp. ley marcial, and Eng. martial
arts ~ Sp. artes marciales. Not
all phrases formed with this word exist in both languages. Thus, Eng. martial music is música militar in Spanish and Eng. court
martial, a mid-17th century phrasal loanword from French, literally ‘war
court’, translates into Spanish as tribunal
de guerra or consejo de guerra.
Eng. martial is a
14th century loanword from Latin. Sp. marcial
is also a Latin loanword, first attested in the early 17th century, in
Cervantes’ El Quijote. Note that the
Latin ‑tial ending was changed to ‑cial in Spanish spelling, as usual in Spanish
words from Latin. That is because in Old Spanish, the Latin letter combination ‑ti between two vowels came to be
pronounced the same way as the Latin sound combination ‑ci anywhere, namely [ʦ̪i]
or [ʣ̪i], depending on
the context. Other words where we can see the Lat. t ~ Sp. c alternation
are: ausencia < absentia (cf. Eng. absence), potencia < potentia (cf. Eng. potency), gracia < gratia (cf. Eng. grace), ciencia < scientia (cf. Eng. science). Note that English cognates tend to have a c also, if they came into the language
through French, but not otherwise, as in the case of Eng. martial ~ Sp. marcial, or
Eng. presidential ~ Sp. presidencial.
Most other European languages also have names for this month
that descend from the Latin word either through natural descent or through borrowing,
e.g. Catalan març, Portuguese março, Italian marzo /ˈmaɾ.ʦ̪o/, German März, Norwegian and Swedish mars, Danish marts, Hellenistic Greek μάρτιος
(Mártios), Russian март (mart), Polish marzec,
Turkish mart, Arabic مارس (mars), and Basque martxo
(another, autochthonous or homegrown Basque name for this month is epail ‘pruning month’, from epai ‘cut, prune’).
Month 2: aprīlis (mēnsis)
The name of the second Roman month was aprīlis, from where
we get Eng. April and Sp. abril. It is not totally clear what the origin
of this word is and there are several hypotheses. Some believe that it comes from
the name of an Etruscan goddess Apru,
which would be derived from or related to the Greek Ἀφροδίτη (Aphrodítē), known as Aphrodite in English and Afrodita in Spanish. Aphrodite was the Greek
goddess of beauty and love, equivalent to the Roman goddess Venus.
The Etruscans exerted great influence on early Rome and the
Etruscans themselves were greatly influenced by Greek culture, which is why
this theory makes sense. However, the existence of an Etruscan name Apru is only hypothesized and it is not
attested in Etruscan writing. We do know that the Etruscans themselves called
the same month Cabreas. On the other
hand, another connection between Aphrodite and this month is that in Roman
religion, Venus was the tutelary deity (guardian, patron or protector) of this
month.
Of course, the Romans themselves did not know the origin of
the name of this month. Some Roman authors speculated that the name of the
month was related to the verb aperīre
‘to open’, the source of patrimonial Sp. abrir
‘to open’. The reason would obviously be that this is the month when many
plants and flowers open up after the winter months.
English got the name of this month from Old French, first
attested around the year 1300. In Old French, it was avril, as it is still is in Modern French, but by the late 14th
century, English had changed the spelling of this word to make it more like the
original Latin word, by changing the v
to p. As we will see, Eng. april replaced the Old English name for
this month, Eastermonað, which, interestingly, but not surprisingly, was also named
after a fertility goddess. As usual, the substitution was not sudden and for a
while in Middle English both names were used indistinctly.
Sp. abril is
obviously a patrimonial descendant from Lat. aprīlem, the accusative wordform of aprīlis. A Latin p in
that position always became b in Old
Spanish and first the final m and
then much later the final e (before
consonants like l) were dropped.
In most other European languages the name for this month also
stems from the Latin word, e.g. Catalan abril,
Portuguese abril or abriu, Italian aprile, Dutch april,
German April, Swedish april, Russian апре́ль (aprélʹ), Arabic أبريل (ʾabrīl), and Basque apiril.
Month 3: māius (mēnsis) ‘Maia’s (month)’
The month of May was called māĭus (mensis) in Latin, almost certainly after the Roman goddess Māĭa, goddess of fertility.
The Latin adjective māĭus
‘of May’, pronounced /ˈmaːj.jʊs/, was the masculine nominative form (it had to
be masculine to go with the noun mēnsis,
which was masculine), and its feminine form was māĭa, a homophone of the name of the goddess. On the
other hand, this Lat. māĭus
had homophones of its own, since māĭus
is also the neuter form of the comparative adjective māior ‘greater, larger’, comparative form of the Latin adjective magnus ‘great’ and source of Sp. mayor and Eng. major and mayor (cf. Part
II, Chapter 19).
There is another Latin word māĭus,
which was an short for (an elliptical form of) Māĭusdeus ‘great god’, another name or appellation (way
to refer to) for the god Jupiter.
The goddess Maia was daughter of Atlas, wife of
Vulcan, and mother of Mercury. The name of this goddess is thought to come from
the Proto-Indo-European root *meǵh₂‑
‘great’ and so it could have meant originally something like ‘great one’. This
is also the root from where the Latin adjectives for ‘great’ and ‘greater’ that
we just saw come from. Therefore, the name Maia would share its root with those
adjectives and their descendants, as well as with all words derived from the
same root in Latin and Greek, such as the following ones:
- PIE *méǵh₂-s ‘great, etc.’ > A.Gk. μέγᾰς (mégas) ‘big, large, great’; e.g. Eng./Sp. mega‑, as in Eng./Sp. megabyte, Eng. megaton ~ Sp. megatón, Sp. megafonía ‘sound amplification’
- PIE *méǵh₂-is‑ > Lat. magis (adverbial form of magnus) ‘more, more greatly, etc.’, source of más ‘more’ and also found in words like Eng. master ~ Sp. maestro (< Lat. măgister ‘chief, head, director, leader’), Eng. mastery ~ Sp. maestría, Eng. mister
- PIE *maǵ-yes- greater’ > Lat. māi‑ (māius, māia, māior, etc.), e.g. Sp. mayor and Eng. major and mayor
- PIE *m̥ǵh₂-nós > Lat. magnus ‘great’, e.g. Sp. magnífico/a, Eng. magnificent, Sp. magnate ~ Eng. magnate
- PIE *méǵh₂-lo-s > A.Gk. μεγᾰ́λος (megálos), cf. Eng. megalomaniac ~ Sp. megalómano, Eng. megalopolis ~ Sp. megalópolis
From Lat. māĭus,
the name of the month, we get Eng. May /ˈmeɪ̯/
and Sp. mayo /ˈma.ʝo/.
Eng. May can be seen as an early 12th-century
loanword from Old French mai (which
is still spelled mai in Modern
French, now pronounced [ˈmɛ])
but because Lat. maius was also
common in writings in Latin in the Old English period, Eng. May replaced the Old English
(Anglo-Saxon) name Þrīmeolce and Þrīmilcemōnað (see below).
As usual, the names for this month in English and Spanish
have cognates in most other European languages, e.g. Portuguese maio, Italian maggio, Dutch mei, German
Mai ), Swedish and Danish maj, Russian май (maj), Arabic مايو (māyū), and Basque maiatz
(also known as loreil ‘month of
flowers’).
Month 4: iūnĭus (mēnsis) ‘Iuno’s (month)’
Figure 112: Statue of Juno, Vatican,
Rome, Italy.[i]
Just like the month of May was named after a goddess, so was
the month of June, the fourth month of the original Roman calendar. It was named
after the goddess Iūnō
(genitive: Iūnōnis; regular stem: Iūnōn‑). The name of the goddess is
spelled Juno in both English and
Spanish and it is pronounced /ˈʤu.noʊ̯/ in English and /ˈxu.no/ in Spanish. She
was the Roman goddess of love and marriage and queen of the gods. She was daughter
of Saturn, mother of Mars and Vulcan, and sister of Jupiter, as well as his
wife in some interpretations of Roman mythology. She was the patron goddess of
the city of Rome as well as of the Roman Empire. This goddess was the equivalent
to the Greek goddess Hera.
Some think that the name goes back to the same
Proto-Indo-European root as Lat. iuvenis ‘youth’
(same in the nominative and genitive; accusative: iuvenem), the source of Sp. joven
‘young; youth’, and also the same root as iūnior
‘younger’, the source of Eng. junior (genitive:
iūniōris, regular stem: iūniōr‑). The original meaning of this
root supposedly was something like ‘vital force’ or ‘vital energy’.
The name of the month was iūnĭus mēnsis or mēnsis
iūnĭus, which by ellipsis was
reduced to iūnĭus.
Actually, Lat. iūnĭus
is thought to be a contraction of iūnĭonĭus
(see above) and it can be analyzed as consisting of the stem Iūn‑ of the goddess’s name
and the ending ‑ĭus, of
which the ‑ĭ‑ part was
a derivational suffix that created first/second declension adjectives and the ‑us part the nominative inflection: Iūn‑ĭ‑us;
regular stem: Iūn‑ĭ‑.
From Lat. iūnĭus,
pronounced [ˈjuː.nɪ.ʊs]
in Classical Latin, we get Eng. June /ˈʤun/ and Sp. junio /ˈxu.ni̯o/.
The word June is
attested in English as early as 1100, in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle for that
year. In some contexts of early use we can see it as a borrowing from Latin,
but in others as an Old French loanword, as this name for the month slowly came
to replace the Anglo-Saxon name for the month, Ǣrra Līða (see §22.7 below). The spelling
of the word varied a great deal both in Old French and in Anglo-Norman, the Old
French dialect spoken by the invading Normans in England, such as join, junye, junie, jun, juin,
etc., until finally settling on June.
Other European languages have borrowed the name of this
month from Latin as well, resulting in cognates of the English and Spanish
names, e.g. Catalan juny, Portuguese junho, Italian giugno, Dutch and Swedish juni,
German Juni, Russian июнь (ijúnʹ), and
Arabic يونيو (yūniyō). (The Basque name for
this month is not a loanword this time. This most common name for the month in Basque
is ekain, which seems to be derived from
eki ‘sun’ and gain ‘top’, for June is when the sun is at its highest.)
[GO TO PART 3]
[GO TO PART 3]
[i] Source: By William Henry
Goodyear - Brooklyn Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31058846
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