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)
“It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; Mbut when a beginning is madewhen felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, feltit must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.”
—Jane Austen (17751817)
“Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark-nippled
who now these two months long
is bones and tatters of flesh in earth.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)