[Nahuat-l] Understanding of a folk etymology
Galen Brokaw
brokaw at buffalo.edu
Fri Apr 24 10:15:42 CDT 2009
Hi Jonathan,
I think the "in vain" part of the meaning has to do with the special
status of these days, which I understand were considered kind of
dangerous or unlucky. But the nemontemi days would have to have had day
signs as well as numbers. It is just that these five days with their day
signs did not belong to one of the regular months. If they didn't have
signs, then the name of the year, based either on the sign of the last
or the first day of the year, would always be the same. Those five days
are the reason that the names of the years change and were limited to
four. If you name your year after the sign and the number of the first
day of the year, for example, you run through the cycle of twenty signs
eighteen times over the course of the year, then you have the five days
of the nemontemi. So the first day of the nemontemi is the beginning of
another cycle of the twenty day signs. This means that the first day of
the nemontemi will have the same day sign as the first day of that year,
which means that the first day of the next solar year will be the sixth
sign in the sequence (the day after the five day-signs of the
nemontemi). And the first day of the following year will be the 11th
sign in the sequence, then the sixteenth, and then the first again. In
other words, the names of the year will keep cycling through this
four-sign sequence. The continuing cycle of thirteen numbers that
matches up to these signs works out so that if the number corresponding
to the first day of the first year is 1, then the number of the first
day of the next year will be 2, and so on. And the combination of the
cycle of four years signs with the thirteen numbers is what produces the
52 year Mesoamerican "century" (4 x 13 = 52). If the name of the year is
based on the last day of the year, it works the same way, because any
given calendrical day of any given year will be offset by five signs and
one number from the corresponding day of the previous and the subsequent
years.
Galen
jonathan.amith at yale.edu wrote:
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