Today I had reason to investigate how months are named in Czech.
My issue was that the Sun java jre (1.5/1.6), for some reason (I presume it’s just something that never got implemented properly) thinks that Czechs abbreviate their months with Roman numerals. So, for example, where an English speaker might write “10 Dec 2008″, java thinks that a Czech speaker would write “20 XII 2008″. I’ve found no evidence that java is correct in its thinking. Furthermore, a (Czech) client of ours has complained about this.
I have customized our java code such that it uses the “proper” abbreviated names for months, when formatting dates in Czech. In doing so, I came across this page http://www.unilang.org/wiki/index.php/Czech_months which suggests that the names for January and February (“leden” and “únor”) mean “ice” and “melting ice”. Names which I think are rather nice.
