Les noms de mois dans le manuscrit hébreu no 1414

Abstract

Manuscript no.1414 from the French National Library, dated from 1246/47, contains a list of twelve names of Christian months written with Hebrew letters. This list must be considered as the embryonic state of Jewish representations of the Christian calendar which became more developed in later documents. It is amongst the oldest written examples of Eastern Yiddish. These names provide new elements to linguistic research about pre-Christian denominations of the Germanic calendar. This article is a detailed study of the etymological and dialectological questions raised by these appellations. Within the context of Yiddish studies, this text shows that from the time of the earliest linguistic documents that we have up to 1349, relations between Christians and Jews caused a direct influence of German dialects on Yiddish.