Names Of Months And The Lunar Calendar
Ramadan comes at a different time every year because it is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, unlike the Gregorian calendar, which is based on the solar year. The month of Ramadan thus moves backwards about 10 days every year relative to the Gregorian calendar. It means it takes 36 to 36 year for Ramadan to start around the same date. In other words, Lunar calendar has no alignment with seasons.
When we do some changes to any existing practice we have to determine the benefits of that change. Islam is a simple religion, please keep it simple and do not make things complicated. Remember what happened during Gen. Musharraf time in Pakistan. He wanted to use the western idea of day time saving but what happened? People started saying , Musharraf time or the clock time.😀
But that’s what the names of the months indicate. That the calendar was an intercalculated one. I’ve explained some of the names of the month
We cannot use the etymology to challenge a well-known meaning of a word with clear manifestation after its separates from that etymology and becomes a separate terminology and has been well-known and well-used for generations.
A word can have any literal meaning. But over the time, when a word loses it’s literal meaning in favour of another meaning or adds another meaning to its literal meaning, then it is not linguistically sound to trace back that new terminology to its literal meaning and calling it flawed just because literal meaning was something else. If that terminology has been used with a clear manifestation like for the name of a month instead of its original meaning/rationale behind its name, then the usage of that terminology by the people of language takes precedence over its literal meaning.
I cannot comment on the detailed meaning of Nasi. Maybe Irfan Sahab can. But the point being that after revelation of Quran and the way Quran mentions these Haram months, it clearly tells us that these months were well known to Arabs despite being observance of Nasi through addition of kabisa or substitution of months. Even for the sake of argument, let’s say there was some confusion in these months because of this practice, there are narrations which tell us that even that confusion was clarified by the Prophet Muhammad (SWS) himself.