Stephen Chrisomalis:

> 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 survivedthroughout the entire
> colonial period.

OK. I am naive, but not to this point. :-)

Clearly, Maya numerals had been lost and forgotten, along with all the rest
of Maya culture, and they have only been re-discovered and popularized by
archaeologists. So, those house numbers are no doubt a form of revival.

What I was wondering is whether the reason for the revival could have
practical reasons, connected with the difficulty in translating numbers
between Maya and a decimal-based language. Notice that the places where I
saw these signs were residential roads, quite far away from the downtown
areas where tourists were supposed to seek accommodation and amusements.

Another possible reason for the revival, as said by Etaonsh, is the natives'
pride for their linguistic and cultural heritage. This third explanation is
not at all to be impossible: for example, in many archaeological sites and
museums, the captions on the monuments were written in Spanish, English,
*and* modern Maya (in Latin script, of course). This quite demonstrate that
there is a public of educated natives.

> The latest (pre-modern) text containing the bar-and-dot numerals
> is one of the books of Chilam Balam [...]

A book which must still be extremely popular among natives... Virtually all
bookshops or arts-and-crafts stalls in the area sold fac-simile editions of
it, and it was not only foreign tourists who bought copies.

> 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.
> [...]
> Looking on various web sites (ranging from the respectable
> to the ludicrous) one gets the idea that positional
> numbers are ubiquitous in Maya [...]

Thanks for this insight! I too was convinced of this myth, following the
popular idea that "Mayas independently invented digit zero".

However, this doesn't totally prove out that this revival might have
practical and/or political reasons behind it: modern Mayas probably learned
abut the ancient Maya culture through the same popular literature which is
available to anyone else in the world, so they also swallowed the idea that
the vigesimal system was generally positional.

_ Marco