From jcowan@reutershealth.com Mon Oct 30 12:22:25 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_2_1); 30 Oct 2000 20:22:25 -0000 Received: (qmail 18762 invoked from network); 30 Oct 2000 20:22:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 30 Oct 2000 20:22:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta1 with SMTP; 30 Oct 2000 20:22:24 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA03217; Mon, 30 Oct 2000 15:23:04 -0500 (EST) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com Message-ID: <39FDD89F.61D58E3C@reutershealth.com> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 15:22:55 -0500 Organization: Reuters Health Information X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: pycyn@aol.com Cc: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] month names References: <8.c12f9bc.272f2838@aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 4759 pycyn@aol.com wrote: > (I seem to recall the Aztecs > or the Mayans had a system with both plant and animal names: "4 Cane" and "5 > Jaguar" stick in my mind as important for something or other). Mayan. Actually, the names are not month names, but day names. In the sacred calendar, days were named by the number of the day of the week (13 days) followed by the name of the day of the month (20 days), without naming the months at all. When the cycle wrapped around after 260 days, a new year began; years were not numbered in this calendar. We used to think that this system was also used for Mayan personal names (i.e. people were named after their birthdays), but IIRC this is no longer believed. For practical purposes, the Mayans used a solar-based agricultural calendar, with 18 named months of 20 days each plus 5 days left over. Finally, chronology was expressed using the Long Count, a Julian-day-style count running since the beginning of the Mayan era (probably 13 August 3114 B.C., Gregorian proleptic calendar). The count was expressed by five digits, some base 13, some base 18, and some base 20. It will wrap around to 0;0;0;0;0 on 21 December 2012, at which time the world will come to an end. -- There is / one art || John Cowan no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein