THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CALENDAR" 



By E. Forstemanx 



Dr Daniel G. Brinton, professor of American archeology and 

 philology in the University of Pennsylvania, besides making many 

 investigations in other directions, has since the year 1809 furnished 

 numerous valuable contributions to his special branch of the science. 

 Among these is his recent boolc The Xative Calendar of Central 

 America and Mexico (Philadelphia. 1898). This calendar is in 

 every essential point identical in the territory of the Xahuas in the 

 valley of Mexico and in Guatemala and Nicaragua, among the Mayas 

 of Yucatan and their kindred in Chiapas and the surrounding region, 

 hence among tribes Avhich are linguistically unrelated. The chief 

 feature of this book of Brinton's is an investigation of the names 

 which in very different ways have been given by these peoples to the 

 20 single days and to the 18-day and 20-day periods of the year, 

 erroneously called months. Certainly, no one is able to carry out 

 a linguistic investigation of tliis kind more thoroughly than Doctor 

 Brinton, since he has access to numerous manuscript vocabularies 

 of the language, some of them in the library of the American Philo- 

 sophical Society and others in his own possession. With the aid 

 of these, he seeks in this book to determine the fundamental mean- 

 ing of the different Avords by which a certain day is designated ; with 

 the so-called months no such agreement is found. This meaning c.ni 

 always be found in the living forms of transmitted speech in Nahuatl, 

 while in Maya, Tzental, Kiche, Cakchikel, and in the Zaj^otec these 

 words mostly have an archaic character, which points to a greater 

 antiquity of the calendar than it has in Nahuatl and naturally leaves 

 room for much doubt. Now, it seems as if this investigation might 

 be materially aided by the study of the appertaining glyphs, but Doc- 

 tor Brinton does not admit this, for, according to his view, the glyphs 

 have nothing whatever to do with the meaning of the Avord, but only 

 Avith the sound, as if we Avere to attempt to represent the English 

 pronoun '' I "' by an eye or the A\ord *" matron "' by a mat and a i)er- 

 son running. I do not deny such a process, but accept it in the cases 

 where an old day name has vanis^ied from the living language; thus, 



" Ziim mittelamerikiinishchen Kalender, (Jlobiis, 1894, v. «.">, p. -<i. 



517 



