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Luis Manuel Peña.

In this third post of a three-part series [See The months of the year in Basque (1) and The months of the year in Basque (2)] we place our focus and attention on the last four months of the year.

Irail ‘September’. This is the ‘month or moon of the fern’, from ira ‘fern’ + (h)il ‘month or moon’, also called garoil in some places, from garo, synonym of ira. We have another remarkable and rather controversial name for this month, which is buruil, a diversity of opinions having been generated around it. Curiously enough, its first component buru could mean ‘head or start’ but also ‘finish or end’, and accordingly, some researches, Vinson among others, defend that September would once upon a time have been the first month of the Basque agricultural calendar, whereas others, such as Wagner, Campión or Caro Baroja himself, argue that it would have been the last. In an attempt to come to terms with such divergent interpretations, we shall us paraphrase Caro Baroja: “it is clear that some months would, at first, not correspond exactly to current Latin ones”. (more…)