De la protraction en maya?

Abstract

Overcounting is a neologism which was proposed in the late XXth century to define « the operation that designates a number by its orientation towards a boundary ». With a few examples taken from Asiatic languages, Mayan numerations from Central America are generally given as representative of this uncommon type of linguistic operation to build words for numbers. However, our analysis of the operative pattern in this kind of Mayan numeration (which has cohabited for many centuries with a more simply additive type of number construction) as well as the analysis of the data from pre-hispanic times and the colonial period brought us to question this definition, at least for Mayan languages. Our study indeed shows that the so-called “overcounting” system in Mayan numerations, if it was definitely present there a long time before the Europeans, was strongly associated to an aspect of the comput that sets to work an “encapsulation” of the vigesimal scores and where a number is actually not designated for its orientation towards the higher boundary but where the aim is to process in a non-linear way following an “encapsulation of the numerical knots” and looking for a retrograde anteriority.