Talk:Mayan calendar: Difference between revisions
→"Mayan" nomenclature and the regularity of the Long Count: new section
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--[[User:Thundergnat|Thundergnat]] ([[User talk:Thundergnat|talk]]) 02:50, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
== "Mayan" nomenclature and the regularity of the Long Count ==
I think it's worth noting that these calendars, or very similar ones, were used by multiple Mesoamerican cultures (e.g. Zapotec, Olmec, Aztec), and the names used for them were coined by modern Mayanists and are not necessarily contemporary. Also, I think the Long Count is best understood as a simple linear count of days rather than a Gregorian-like calendar system. We write it in dotted-decimal notation, but each number in that notation represents a single digit in the original script. It's true that the represented number of days is not equal to the apparent value of the numeral, but the relationship to the numeral is much more regular than most systems of calendar units. A good analogy is the common practice of writing the 24-hour time of day as a four-digit number, e.g. "1637" for 4:37pm. That appears to be an ordinary numeral, yet it doesn't represent 1,637 minutes after midnight; the second-least-significant digit maxes out at 5 instead of 9, so that the "hundreds" digit counts 60-minute hours instead of 100-minute periods. In much the same way, the second-least-significant digit in the Long Count maxes out at 17 instead of 19, so that the "400s" digit counts 360-day _tun_'s instead of 400-day periods. But all of the other units are 20 of the next lower unit, because they're really just digits in the number. --[[User:Markjreed|Markjreed]] ([[User talk:Markjreed|talk]]) 21:59, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
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