the system of traditional

the system of traditional customs related the North-African calendar.

Photo taken on 31 December 2007 near Tafraout (Morocco), with the writings aseggas ameggaz ("good year") in Tifinagh and bonne année 2959 ("good year 2959") in French. Note the 1-year mistake, as 2959 corresponds to the Gregorian year 2009.

Neologisms and false traditions

An interesting aspect from the anthropological point of view, concerning the birth of traditions, is the flourish of innovations that "restore" alleged forgotten customs. This phenomenon exists in the context of the rediscovery of a long-denied and hiddenidentity and is aimed at regaining a lost or endangered heritage. The calendar, perceived as particularly important due to its connection to the control of time, has been the object of many of these innovations, some of which have gained consensus and been adopted as a genuine part of Berber traditional heritage. Examples follow.

Names of the months

Tab. 4 - The "Berber" week

Day	Académie Berbère	Compounds with numerals
Monday	aram	aynas
Tuesday	arim	asinas
Wednesday	ahad	akras
Thursday	amhad	akwas
Friday	sem	asemwas
Saturday	sed	asedyas
Sunday	acer	asamas

Since the names of the months used in pre-Roman era are unknown (those shown in Table 1 are known only in the academic community), some tried to reconstruct "authentically Berber" names. Beginning with the most known name, yennayer, some have considered it a Berber word composed of yan (the numeral "one" in various Berber dialects) and (a)yur, "moon/month", and on this basis reconstructed the other month names: 1. yenyur or yennayur, 2. sinyur, 3. krayur, 4. kuzyur, 5. semyur, 6.sedyur, 7. sayur, 8. tamyur, 9. tzayur 10. mrayur, 11. yamrayur 12. megyur.

Weekdays

Even for the weekdays, the ancient native names are unknown, so some tried to "fill in the blanks" with new terms. Two series of them are currently widespread. The first and best known is of unclear origin, but probably dates to the circle of the Académie Berbère of Paris in the late 1960s; the second one simply repeats for the weekdays the same process used for the months, with the creation of a suffix -as ("day") in place of -yur.^[13] The former series, which begins with Monday^[14] and refers to the "European" denominations, is not prone to misunderstandings, while the latter, which refers to a numerical order of the days (beginning, too, with Monday), interferes with the Arabic system currently in use, which starts instead from Sunday, resulting sometimes with the new names being used to refer to different days.^[15]

Days and people names

Often, calendars and almanacs published by Berber militants and cultural circles associate a personal name to each day of the year, in imitation of Western calendars. This also meets the need to reappropriate the traditional proper names, which the Arabization measures in Algeria and Morocco tend to substitute with strictly Arabic ones. Even in this field, it is not uncommon to find improvised lists of names, with nouns collected at random, as a result of casual readings and sometimes even of mistakes or typos.