Mayan Nomenclature

Mayan Nomenclature is a linguistic article about the nomenclature of the Mayan language published in The University press, Cambridge, 1906.

Charles Pickering Bowditch comments on aspects such as the type of numbering used in the Mayan language, very different from the decimal system currently used. He places special emphasis on the system for numbering time: hours and days.

It establishes some theories such as that the period of 20 times 360 days was called katun and not ahau, that each of the parts that make up a katun were called tun and that in the books of Chilan Balam there is no reference to any other period of time called ahaukatun.

And this system is, as far as we know, used for nothing else but for reckoning days. The only difference between the first system and the second is that in the first system twenty of the second term equal one of the third, while in the second system eighteen of the second equal one of the third.