September, October, November, December – 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th one?

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Woods
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September, October, November, December – 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th one?

Postby Woods » 2017-02-17, 11:19

I just realised what the names of the last months of the year mean:

September = the 7th one
October = the 8th one
November = the 9th one
December = the 10th one

Why this two-month difference – what was the Roman year like?

And… where do the names of the other months come from? (I can figure that August comes from Augustus, July from Julius and so on, but not all the months (and even the Oxford English Dictionary does not state where April comes from, for example). Did the Romans name months after different things (or people), but run out of creativity at the end and just called the last ones 7th/8th/9th/10th one, and finally add two more months at the beginning of the year so everything moved two months later?

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linguoboy
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Re: September, October, November, December – 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th one?

Postby linguoboy » 2017-02-17, 14:27

Not to ride the same hobby horse again, but any basic introduction to the Western calendar online will explain how this came to be. (Short story: These were the 7th-10th months in the Roman calendar before Julius Caesar revised it.)
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons


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