Re: Introduction / question

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@...>
>To: <qalam@yahoogroups.com>
>Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 5:36 PM
>Subject: RE: Introduction / question


>>Stephen Chrisomalis wrote:
>> [...]
>> I'd like to think that I have some small degree of expertise
>> in this field, and that I can help answer questions posed by
>> people on this list
>> [...]

>(Lifts hand.)

>I have a question which I have been pondering for years. Its about the
>*modern* usage of Maya numerals.

>A few years ago I visited Mexico, and was surprised to see that Maya
>numerals (these: http://www.saxakali.com/historymam2.htm) were used for
>house numbers in many villages and towns in Yucatán and Chiapas. I think

one

>of these places was Palenque (Chiapas), a little town nearby the famous
>archeological site of the same name, but I should check my photographs.

>Another thing I noticed is that native people often say monetary values in
>Spanish even when they speak in their Maya dialect. I heard several such
>conversations at the market: the seller and customer spoke in the local
>language, but when the customer asked for the price (or, rather, pointed to
>a product asking something I could not understand), the other guy replied
>with a price in Spanish.

>One guy explained me that the reason for this is that banknotes and price
>tags are "written in Spanish", so they don't have to translate. This
>surprised me at first, because price tags are normally written in *digits*,
>not in words. But then I realized that he probably was talking about
>converting from the decimal to the vigesimal numbering.

>If a price tag reads "234", it is straightforward to understand that 234 =
>2*100 + 3*10 + 4 and, thus, that "234" reads "dos cientos cuarenta

cuatro".

>On the other hand, it is not so straightforward to calculate that 234 =
>11*20 + 14 and, hence, that "234" reads "<eleven.twenties> <fourteen>".

>(All this sounds very OT, but I'm coming to the point!)

>From this, I argued that the use of Maya numerals for house numbers could
>have a similar explanation. If you are seeking for someone leaving in
>"<eleven.twenties> <fourteen> Zapata road", it is not easy to calculate

that

>you should look for the figures "234" painted on the wall. OTOH, it is
>straightforward to look for the signs "<eleven><fourteen>".

>But, years later, an anthropologist destroyed my explanation saying that,

in

>his opinion, this usage is just a revival invented to amuse tourists in
>places near Maya archaeological sites. And, I must admit, in Mexico I have
>mostly been visiting archeology or other tourist areas.

>What is your opiniong about this? Are those house numbers a seriously

modern

>numbering system or just an archaeological divertissement?

>_ Marco

It seems overwhelmingly probable that this usage is a revival inspired by
the tourist industry. This is not to deny that it could be revived into a
"seriously modern numbering system", but it's not likely that they survived
throughout the entire colonial period. The latest (pre-modern) text
containing the bar-and-dot numerals is one of the books of Chilam Balam from
1793, but this is mostly just a description of the system from an
antiquarian perspective (cf. Sir Eric Thompson, "Maya Hieroglyphic Writing",
1971, p. 30). There are few instances of the numerals from after 1600. I
think you are quite right about the use of Spanish words for money having
something to do with the fact that Mayan languages use vigesimal number
words (not forgetting, of course, that in an earlier age people may have
been required to use Spanish number words when dealing with the government).

One of the things that few people realize about these bar-and-dot numerals
is that their positional variant (where multiple numbers from 0 to 19 are
found in sequence, as in the example you give of 11.14 = 234) is extremely
rare. It is found on a few early (Middle/Late Formative) stelae, and then
basically in one of the surviving Postclassic codices, the Dresden codex,
which is an astronomical text. I Virtually all other Maya inscriptions that
contain numbers use the signs for 0-19 as numerical coefficients associated
with glyphs for the five main Maya time periods (kin, uinal, tun, katun,
baktun). When period-glyphs are included, these phrases are probably best
read as "X baktuns, X katuns, X tuns, X uinals, and X kins" just as we might
say "X centuries, X decades, X years, X months, and X days". Interestingly,
there is only one stela (Stela 1 from Pestac) from the Maya Classic period -
the height of its civilization - where period-glyphs are omitted in writing
a date.

Looking on various web sites (ranging from the respectable to the ludicrous)
one gets the idea that positional numbers are ubiquitous in Maya
inscriptions, but it just isn't so. Obviously, an enormous amount of Maya
literature was destroyed in the 16th c., so there's no way to know exactly
how common positional numeration was among the Maya, and of course absence
of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but the fact remains that we know far
too little about Maya use of positionality to claim its general use over a
long period of time.

Stephen Chrisomalis
Department of Anthropology, McGill University
schris1@...