It’s Time to Talk About Moons and Months

With the Hebrew lunar month of Elul now in its third quarter, and the lunar month of Tishrei approaching, it’s a good time to talk about moons and months.

The similarity or identity of the words for moon and month in a high percentage of the world’s languages attests to the lunar cycle’s having been a basic measurement of time from the earliest stages of human history. Our English words “moon” and “month” are themselves an example. So, looking now at a few widely divergent tongues, are Swedish måne and månad; Polish miesiąc and miesiąc; Lithuanian mėnuo and mėnulis; Finnish kuu and kuukousi; Turkish ay and ay; Japanese tsuki and tsuki; Chinese yuè and yuèliang; Indonesian bulan and bulan; Swahili mwezi and mwezi; and Mohawk ehnita and ehnita.

In the case of the Indo-European languages on that list (English, Swedish, Polish, and Lithuanian), the words for moon and month ultimately derive from the proto-Indo-European noun mėhns, which in turn comes from the conjectured verb meh, to measure. The root of meh also appears in a lunar context in some Indo-European languages in which the words for moon and month are not etymologically related. Thus, “moon” in Latin is luna, which goes back to the Indo-European root lewk, “bright” or “shining” (as in Greek leuko, “white,” whence leucocytes or white blood cells); hence, Spanish and Italian luna, French lune, and Portuguese lua.