Months
The various Adaduanan cycles within the year are given a number of appellations, which are not the same from place to place, and of course never quite the same from year to year, since there are fewer than nine and more than eight cycles in any one year. OpƐpon (OpƐ, harmatan, dry season; pon, supreme) for example, more or less corresponds to the Adaduanan which appears about January–February in the middle of the dry season. Every three years or so, one of the nine named Adaduanan is omitted from the year because of the extra thirteen days gained when observing nine cycles a year. The names of the Adaduanan are therefore flexible and vary over time and cline.
Today some of the names for the Adaduanan cycles have been arbitrarily applied to the Gregorian calendar of twelve months by some Akan scholars, although there is no traditional basis for such a translation. For example, Opepon is now used for the Akan word for January even though in the traditional Akan calendar there is no concept exactly corresponding to the Roman month of January (Janus the god facing the past and future). The beginning and end of each Akan year tends to be the various yam festivals celebrated around August or September.
Read more about this topic: Akan Calendar
Famous quotes containing the word months:
“So much for Mrs. Hollis’ nine months of pain and 20 years of hope.”
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Nameless GI, Objective Burma, cutting dog tags off a dead GI (1945)
“I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes—and six months later you have to start all over again.”
—Joan Rivers (b. 1935)
“When I think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side,—I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)