title: Standalone form of month name in Java date format
body: <p>I need to format incomplete date only to month precision. My first guess was to apply pattern "MMMM yyyy" to it. This works fine for many locales (English, German, ...), but gives ugly result for languages with flexion, e.g. Russian. I read <a href="https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html" rel="noreferrer">documentation of <code>SimpleDateFormat</code></a> and found that 'L' is supposed to give context-insensitive month name: just what I need, as there is no day of month in the pattern. So I tried pattern "LLLL yyyy" instead. It works perfectly for Russian and other flexion languages, but instead fails for e.g. English and German...</p>
  
  <p>Here is the test code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import java.text.*;
  import java.util.*;
  
  public class test
  {
      public static void main (String[] arguments) throws Exception
      {
          for (String locale : new String[] { "en", "de", "hu", "it", "ru", "fi", "pl" })
              System.out.format ("%s: %s \t%s\n", locale,
                                 new SimpleDateFormat ("MMMM yyyy", new Locale (locale)).format (new Date ()),
                                 new SimpleDateFormat ("LLLL yyyy", new Locale (locale)).format (new Date ()));
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And its output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>en: September 2015      0009 2015
  de: September 2015      0009 2015
  hu: szeptember 2015     szeptember 2015
  it: settembre 2015      Settembre 2015
  ru: сентября 2015       Сентябрь 2015
  fi: syyskuuta 2015      syyskuu 2015
  pl: września 2015       wrzesień 2015
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So, for the tested locales: 'en' and 'de' work properly only with 'M', 'hu' is fine with both 'M' and 'L', 'it' is probably better off with 'L' (don't know how important capital letter is here), while 'ru', 'fi' and 'pl' give correct output only with 'L' (this I can really tell only for Russian and Polish, but I presume it's similar in Finnish).</p>
  
  <p>Questions:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Can I do something to make <code>SimpleDateFormat</code> or a similar date formatting class treat 'L' properly for all locales?</p></li>
  <li><p>Alternatively, is there a simple way to tell if 'M' or 'L' should be used for any given locale?</p></li>
  </ul>