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A Good Month to Cut Wood?
Since it's the beginning of a New Year, it's as good a time as any to talk about the names of months in various languages. Most European languages use the same Latin roots for the names of months, which is why it's usually pretty easy to learn them. January, for example, is janvier in French, Januar in German, enero in Spanish, gennaio in Italian, januari in Dutch, as well as in Swedish. Even Hungarian, which is not an Indo-European language, calls the month január. But other European languages don't use the Latin roots for months, especially among the Slavic languages. Russian does; January is yanvar. But other Slavic languages take a more descriptive approach. In Czech, for example, January is leden, meaning "month of ice." In Ukrainian, it's basically the same meaning, but the word is sichen. In Croatian, the month is apparently thought of as the best time to cut wood, because it is called Siječanj, or the "[wood] cutting month," at least according to one possible etymology. Polish takes a bit of a poetic approach, calling January styczeń, or "the month that joins [two years]." In East Asia, a lot of languages number their months, so January is simply "month one" or "first month." In Japanese that's ichi gatsu, in Chinese it's yī yuè, in Korean it's il wol and in Vietnamese it's Tháng một. Things get a bit more complicated with languages that are spoken in countries or regions that use a different calendar for religious or other cultural purposes. Arabic, for example, uses three different calendars. The Gregorian calendar is used, and the name for January is similar to English - yanaayir. Arabic also uses a Lunar Calendar for religious contexts, especially to determine holy days and holy months. The first month of the lunar calendar, which doesn't quite align with the month of January because it's based on the lunar cycle, is called kaanuun ath-thaaniyy. Finally, there is also the Islamic Calendar, used in both religious and secular contexts in the Middle East. Again, the months start when the moon is first visible, so there's no easy alignment between the Islamic (or Lunar) Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar. The first month of the Islamic Calendar is muHarram. India uses different Hindu calendars that are based on different eras, so the years do not match the years used in the calendar based on the Common Era. This is much like the Jewish Calendar, which began thousands of years before the Common Era calendar, but which is lunar, so there's no simple alignment between the two systems. Thankfully, both languages also use the Common Era calendar, with the easily recognizable months janvari in Hindi, and yanuar in Hebrew. Tags: foreign language, January, months
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