Subject: Re: [lojban] month names

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 15:22:55 -0500

[email-masked] 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.

-- 
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