Read, Think, Remain.

Latin: Delecta me cum caeleste, quod sum lassa terrae munerum.

Greek: τέρπου ἐμέ μετά τοῦ οὐράνίου, διά ταλαιπώρου τῶν ἐπίγειου πονῶν.

Ruins of Tharros, Sardinia.

A month ago, I spoke with a friend who is involved in a project to create the Interslavic language – another attempt to create a common Slavic language that is understandable to speakers of any of the languages of the Slavic group without additional training. In conversation, he strongly complained about the mess in the names of months in different Slavic languages.  Of course, I checked it and found complete insanity (in the table below I tried to color groups of names formed from a common root or at least by the same principle).

In Russian and Serbian (as well as some Polish), Latin names are used (dating back to the Roman calendar), so everything is simple here. In other cases, the etymology has mainly weather (студень = cold, лютый = fierce), natural (листопад = leaf fall, цветень = pollen, травень = grass) and agricultural (гроздобер = picking grapes, серпень = sickle, житар = harvest) roots, and since, depending on the climate, such natural processes occur in different places at different times, the spread of one name on the calendar can be quite large: Macedonian студен is November, and Belarusian студзень is January.

Autumn names орач, руен (Bulgarian), rujan (Croatian), září, říjen (Czech) supposedly indicate the roar of a deer during the rutting season. Of the unique names, my attention was drawn by the Macedonian name of January коложег, supposedly dating back to the Albanian djegqerrës, the month of burning carts; it should not be confused with the Croatian kolovoz (August), the month of transportation of mown grain. The Czech name of February Únor is presumably related to the “diving” of ice on rivers; the Slovenian roznic (June) is borrowed from the German Rosenmonat, the month of roses blooming, and the Croatian veljača (February) and ozujak (March) mean, according to some sources, respectively, changeable and deceptive.

Neanderthals are a relatively young—or new—species of man.

They are named after their location of discovery: das Neanderthal (Neander valley).

Neander valley is named after a 17th century German theologian called Joachim Neander.

Joachimsthal "Joachim's valley" in Bohemia (now Jáchymov) was the place where some German coins were minted.

The coins were thus called Thaler / Taler "from the valley, from Joachimsthal".