NavList:

Paul, you wrote:
"Bowditch was a pioneer in Maya studies and a terrific writer. In fact, his work was responsible in part for my taking Celestial Navigation (Astro 99) from Francis Wright in Sophomore year as I was building my skills in order to use a box sextant to measure structures in the Northern Peten for suspected celestial alignments."

Very cool!

"But there are countless other instances of the Maya demonstrating
calendric virtuosity and sometimes no small sense of humor. Maya is a
language that lends itself to puns (for example, in Tzotzil maya, "-
bol" can mean both "stupid" and "in-laws.", and there are even puns to
be found in their heiroglyphic texts. "

That's interesting. I've never heard that before. I have tried to keep up with the revolution in Mayan historical studies in the past thirty years, but it's such a huge subject, and I'm still surprised by things as basic as this.

-FER

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