Vocabruary 03 - yanoldu - calendar

This is a badly-coined word, at least for an auxiliary language. Good thing I don’t believe in auxiliary languages, right?

First of all, a proper auxlang would probably derive this from the most common word shared across the languages of its target population, like Esperanto kalendaro, Uropi kalendar, Volapük kaled, Sambahsa calendar, or Ido kalendario. Which, of course, is not how Europic works at all – quite the opposite, in fact. If there’s any way around it, the Europic word will not be similar to Esperanto, mostly out of spite.

Secondly, the derivation is a bit questionable. A “year-holder”? A container for years? That doesn’t even make sense. Moreover, that’s not really how the suffix ‑old‑ is supposed to work: It indicates a container which is designed to hold multiple instances of something. A calendar usually only holds a single year at a time, which is better described with ‑ild‑ (a holder for a single item, like noju ‘knife’ → nojildu ‘scabbard’, branku ‘arm’ → brankildu ‘sleeve’, or even veklu ‘vehicle’ → veklildu ‘parking space’). **Mesoldu – “month holder” – would make a lot more sense. Or **djoroldu. But nope!

To add to the implausibility of this term, the Rivarian Calendar wasn’t implemented until 2281, a couple of generations after anyone had stopped speaking Europic (the Rivarians spoke Vulgar European), so it seems an odd sort of sentence – a bit like writing about French grammar in Latin.