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"2012" a Miscalculation; Actual Calendar Ends 2220
boombaard writes "News is spreading quickly here that scientists writing in a popular science periodical (Dutch) have debunked the 2012 date (google translation linked) featuring so prominently in doomsday predictions/speculation across the web.
On 2012-12-21, the sun will appear where you would normally be able to see the 'galactic equator' of the Milky Way; an occurrence deemed special because it happens 'only' once every 25.800 years, on the winter solstice. However, even if you ignore the fact that there is no actual galactic equator, just an observed one, and that the visual effect is pretty much the same for an entire decade surrounding that date, there are major problems with the way the Maya Calendar is being read by doomsday prophets." I wonder what Amazon's return policy on a box full of 3 doomsday wolves shirts is?
That's just what they want you to think.
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The reason for all the hoopla about 2012, is that in the Maya Calendar, the last creation ended on a 13th Baktun. The lunatics suppose that since the last creation ended on a 13th Baktun, the Maya supposed that this creation would also end after 13 Baktuns, but there is no evidence that the Maya had any such beliefs. There is a date on the West Panel of the Temple of Inscriptions from Palenque that refers to an anniversary of the crowning of the king, Pacal, that makes it quite obvious that the Maya believed that there was a 14th through 20th Baktun.
So, in summary, these guys are wrong about the new correlation, and all the 2012 nutjobs are wrong about even the Maya believing that 2012 was the end of this creation. For more information, see the presentation on the FAMSI (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies) web site by Mark Van Stone that fully details what is known and what is true about Maya beliefs about 2012. http://www.famsi.org/research/vanstone/2012/index.html
Nor did they disappear. Mayans can still be found on any day on the Yucatan peninsula selling hammocks, fixing cars, running banks, building roads and so on. A little tour outside of Merida will show you people still living in sturdy houses made entirely of native materials. The Mayans, although occupied, are still largely alive and well.
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Pretty much all of the so-called "educational" channels have degenerated into non-stop conspiracy factories, showing garbage like "Decoding the Da Vinci Code", Nostradamus prophecies, and nonsense about ghosts around the clock. The History Channel, which had already degenerated into the Hitler Channel, is now more like the "Conspiracies about Hitler and the Occult" channel. Discovery's entire family of networks is bad too...there's something seriously wrong when the most educational show a so-called educational channel has is Mythbusters.
When the Spaniards arrived, all codices and other writings containing any Mayan text were destroyed. The only real surviving literary text survives as a Spanish translation of a book called the Popol Vu, "Governing Book", (I speak a Mayan dialect, Q'eqchi'). The Wikipedia article there translates it as "Book of the Mat", which is a correct literal translation, but loses any contextual meaning. The root word 'pop' is indeed 'mat', but 'popal' has reference to the chief governing body of the people.
At any rate, to answer your question, all Mayan dialects have long since been Romanized, but it has only been in recent years (ten, perhaps) that efforts have been made to standardize the lithography across dialects.
It is interesting to note that the Christian conversion of the Mayan people brought about some surprising abnormalities (or outright perversions) in the spoken language itself. Even amongst the most pure speakers of Mayan dialects, Spanish has left its indelible mark. Take for example the word for 'people' in Q'eqchi': kristiaan. Any Spanish speaker would recognize the transliteration of that word as 'cristiano'. Therefore, in a very subtle way, you are not a person or a group of people unless you are in fact Christian. Crazy, huh?
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others