Understanding of a folk etymology

[Galen Brokaw]

Fritz tells me that several of the messages subsequent to my email last 
night have been garbled, including Jonathan's first message, my reply 
and then his reply. For some reason, most of these have come through 
just fine for me. I suspect that maybe my message from early this 
morning may have caused all the problems. I wrote that message from an 
old laptop that I don't use very much and from a webmail program that I 
believe has caused similar problems with messages to this list in the 
past. I think that program has a default character set that must cause 
problems with the list server. So my apologies. I'm writing this message 
from scratch from my regular computer without hitting 'reply' to any of 
the other messages in this thread. Hopefully that will take care of the 
problem. Anyway, Jonathan's original message said something about the 
relationship between the meaning of "nen" ("in vain") and the five-days 
of the nemontemi period, and I responded as follows:
***
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
***
Then Jonathan pointed out that all of the nemontemi days of all of the 
years of the 52 year cycle (5 x 52) is equal to 260 days, which is 
equivalent to the 260 day cycle of 20 day signs and 13 numbers. The 
upshot of all this is that the end of all of the interrelated cycles of 
the calender converge at precisely the end of the 52 year "century." So 
each 52 year period would start with the same day-sign and number. And 
the cycle would start again.

So assuming this message goes through, that should catch you up if you 
got the garbled messages.

Galen


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