Trecena, veintena and the Nahuatl term for month

[David Wright]

OK, you guys made me curious, so I put down the student papers I was reading
and spent a couple of hours looking at sources on the central Mexican
calendar. A quick check of major sources, in search of the words used to
express the idea of the 18 twenty-day periods of the 365-day calendar, gave
these results:

16th century
- Toribio de Benavente (Motolina): "mes."
- Jerónimo de Mendieta: "mes."
- Bernardino de Sahagún (*Florentine Codex*): "metztli" (Nahuatl column),
"mes" (Castilian column).
- Bartolomé de las Casas: "mes."
- Diego Durán: "mes."
- Juan de Tovar: "mes."
- Francisco Cervantes de Salazar: "mes."
- Alonso de Zorita: "mes."
- Cristóbal del Castillo (text in Nahuatl): "metztli;" we also find the
words "metztlapohualli" and "cecempohualilhuitl" (he calls the thirteen-day
cycles "semanas," using the Castilian term as a loanword within his Nahuatl
text).

17th century
- Juan de Torquemada: "mes."

18th century
- José Joaquín Granados y Gálvez: "mes", "mextli."
- Lorenzo Boturini: "mes."
- Mariano Fernández de Echeverría y Veytia: "mes."
- Francisco Antonio Lorenzana: "mes."
- Antonio de León y Gama: "mes."

19th century
- José Fernando Ramírez: "mes."
- Alfredo Chavero (vol. 1 of *México a través de los siglos*, 1884):
"veintena" ("A esta veintena de días generalmente los autores la llaman mes,
por no encontrar otro nombre que darle. Le dicen también *metztli*, que
quiere decir luna, pero bien claro indica Molina que *metztli* fue aplicado
nada más al mes europeo").
- Eduard Georg Seler (English translations published in 1904 and 1990):
"chronological unit, 20 days," "eighteen twenties falsely called 'months' by
the Spanish," "festival," "month."

20th century
- Alfonso Caso: "mes," "veintena."
- Rafael Tena: "mes," "veintena."

So the first use I found of "veintena" for the central Mexican calendrical
period is Chavero's, published in 1884. Interestingly, it appears together
with a (rather weak) critique of the use of the term "metztli."

My searches weren't exhaustive, so it's possible that authors prior to
Chavero could have used "veintena" in exceptional cases (in previous post I
showed that the Castilian term has been in use since at least 1611), but in
their main descriptions of the calendar the word "mes" is what I found.


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