In Fongbe language, to say "month" we say "sunzan". At first glance, this is not exceptional. However, when one observes more closely the etymology of the word, one obtains "sun" = the moon and "azan" = day. In other words, when our Fɔn ancestors decided to name the month "sunzan", they knew that a month on earth was approximately 1 day on the moon. That is, they were aware of the fact that the rotation of the earth on its own axis was faster than the rotation of the moon on its own.
This is the postulate that I asked myself one day when questioning myself about this problem. So I went to check, and indeed, the moon takes between 27 and 28 Earth days to make a complete revolution on its own axis. Which means that: 1-our ancestors had a scientific method to understand the cosmological phenomenon. 2- unlike the Gregorian calendar which is eminently political, the calendar of our ancestors was based on science, only science, that is to say that their reference is of a natural order and not an artificial human creation (political and often arbitrary).
We young African generations have every interest in paying attention to the ready-made translations that are imposed on us, and to begin to gradually implement, the rehabilitation in due form of science and philosophy, of our ancestors. Stop taking our languages which are the receptacles of our vision of the world for poor languages of science and philosophy because we have been deceived.
I even see friends who laugh at our languages by doing literal translations into colonial languages without realizing that in the end, they analyze the worldview of their ancestors with filters that are strange and foreign to them, rather than seek to understand the substance by starting from their own roots and trying to reconstitute the riches which are veiled from us. You would be surprised how much we learn by analyzing the etymology of words in our languages. Everything we learn through our myths, legends, tales, proverbs etc.
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