Decipherment of rongorongo
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the
Since a proposal by
Accounts from Easter Island
In the late 19th century, within a few years to decades of the destruction of Easter Island society by slave raiding and introduced epidemics, two amateur investigators recorded readings and recitations of rongorongo tablets by Easter Islanders. Both accounts were compromised at best, and are often taken to be worthless, but they are the only accounts from people who may have been familiar with the script first-hand.
Jaussen
In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Étienne Jaussen, received a gift from recent converts on Easter Island: a long cord of human hair wound around a discarded rongorongo tablet.[8][note 1] He immediately recognized the importance of the tablet, and asked Father Hippolyte Roussel on Easter Island to collect more tablets and to find islanders capable of reading them. Roussel was able to acquire only a few additional tablets, and he could find no-one to read them, but the next year in Tahiti Jaussen found a laborer from Easter Island, Metoro Tauꞌa Ure, who was said to know the inscriptions "by heart".[8]
Sometime between 1869 and 1874, Jaussen worked with Metoro to decipher four of the tablets in his possession:
Almost a century later, Thomas Barthel published some of Jaussen's notes.[10] He compared Metoro's chants with parallel passages in other tablets and discovered that Metoro had read the lines of Keiti forwards on the reverse but backwards on the obverse.[11] Jacques Guy found that Metoro had also read the lunar calendar in Mamari backwards, and failed to recognize the "very obvious" pictogram of the full moon within it, demonstrating a lack of any understanding of the contents of the tablets.[12]
Thomson
William J. Thomson, paymaster on the USS Mohican, spent twelve days on Easter Island from 19 December to 30 December 1886, during which time he made an impressive number of observations, including some which are of interest for the decipherment of the rongorongo.[13]
Ancient calendar
Among the ethnographic data Thomson collected were the names of the nights of the
Ure Vaꞌe Iko's recitations
Thomson was told of an old man called Ure Vaꞌe Iko who "professes to have been under instructions in the art of hieroglyphic reading at the time of the
Ure Vaꞌe Iko's readings[citation needed] Recitation Corresponding tablet Apai [note 4] E (Keiti) Atua Matariri [note 5] R (Small Washington) ?[note 6] Eaha to ran ariiki Kete [note 7] S (Great Washington) ?[note 6] Ka ihi uiga [note 8] D (Échancrée) Ate-a-renga-hokau iti poheraa [note 9] C (Mamari)
Salmon's Rapanui was not fluent, and apart from Atua Matariri, which is almost entirely composed of proper names, his English translations do not match what he transcribed of Ure's readings. The readings themselves, seemingly reliable although difficult to interpret at first, become clearly ridiculous towards the end. The last recitation, for instance, which has been accepted as a love song on the strength of Salmon's English translation, is interspersed with Tahitian phrases, including words of European origin, such as "the French flag" (te riva forani) and "give money for revealing [this]" (horoa moni e fahiti), which would not be expected on a pre-contact text.[citation needed][note 10] The very title is a mixture of Rapanui and Tahitian: poheraꞌa is Tahitian for "death"; the Rapanui word is matenga.[26][page needed] Ure was an unwilling informant: even with duress, Thomson was only able to gain his cooperation with "the cup that cheers" (that is, rum):
Finally [Ure] took to the hills with the determination to remain in hiding until after the departure of the Mohican. [U]nscrupulous strategy was the only resource after fair means had failed. [When he] sought the shelter of his own home on [a] rough night [we] took charge of the establishment. When he found escape impossible he became sullen, and refused to look at or touch a tablet [but agreed to] relate some of the ancient traditions. [C]ertain stimulants which had been provided for such an emergency were produced, and [...] as the night grew old and the narrator weary, he was included as the "cup that cheers" made its occasional rounds. [A]t an auspicious moment the photographs of the tablets owned by the bishop were produced for inspection. [...] The photographs were recognized immediately, and the appropriate legend related with fluency and without hesitation from beginning to end.
— Thomson 1891:515
Nonetheless, while no one has succeeded in correlating Ure's readings with the rongorongo texts, they may yet have value for decipherment. The first two recitations, Apai and Atua Matariri, are not corrupted with Tahitian.[citation needed] The verses of Atua Matariri are of the form X ki ꞌai ki roto Y, ka pû te Z "X, by mounting into Y, let Z come forth",[note 11] and when taken literally, they appear to be nonsense:
- "Moon, by mounting into Darkness, let Sun come forth" (verse 25),
- "Killing, by mounting into Stingray, let Shark come forth" (verse 28),
- "Stinging Fly, by mounting into Swarm, let Horsefly come forth" (verse 16).
These verses have generally been interpreted as
Fanciful decipherments
Since the late nineteenth century, there has been all manner of speculation about rongorongo. Most remained obscure, but a few attracted considerable attention.[citation needed]
In 1892 the Australian pediatrician Alan Carroll published a fanciful translation, based on the idea that the texts were written by an extinct "
In 1932 the Hungarian
At least a score of decipherments have been claimed since then, none of which have been accepted by other rongorongo
For instance, ethnographerhe cut a rangi sugarcane, a tara yam, he cut lots of taro, of stalks (?), he cut a yam, he harvested, he cut a yam, he cut, he pulled up, he cut a honui, he cut a sugarcane, he cut, he harvested, he took, a kihi, he chose a kihi, he took a kihi ...
— Text P, recto, line 1[note 13]
and continues in this vein to the end:
he harvested a yam, a poporo, a calabash, he pulled up a yam, he cut, he cut one plant, he cut one plant, a yam, he cut a banana, he harvested a sugarcane, he cut a taro, he cut a kahu yam, a yam, a yam ...
— Text P, verso, line 11[note 13]
The other texts are similar. For example, the Mamari calendar makes no mention of time or the moon in Fedorova's account:
a root, a root, a root, a root, a root, a root [that is, a lot of roots], a tuber, he took, he cut a potato tuber, he dug up yam shoots, a yam tuber, a potato tuber, a tuber ...
— Text C, recto, line 7[note 13]
which even Fedorova characterized as "worthy of a maniac".[33]
Moreover, the allographs detected by Pozdniakov are given different readings by Fedorova, so that, for example, otherwise parallel texts repeatedly substitute the purported verb maꞌu "take" for the purported noun tonga "a kind of yam". (Pozdniakov has demonstrated that these are graphic variants of the same glyph.) As it was, Fedorova's catalog consisted of only 130 glyphs; Pozdniakov's additional allography would have reduced that number and made her interpretation even more repetitive. Such extreme repetition is a problem with all attempts to read rongorongo as a logographic script.[34]
Many recent scholars[30][35][36][37][38][page needed][full citation needed] are of the opinion that, while many researchers have made modest incremental contributions to the understanding of rongorongo, notably Kudrjavtsev et al., Butinov and Knorozov, and Thomas Barthel, the attempts at actual decipherment, such as those of Fedorova here or of Fischer below, "are not accompanied by the least justification".[note 14] All fail the key test of decipherment: a meaningful application to novel texts and patterns.[citation needed]
Harrison
James Park Harrison, a council member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, noticed that lines Gr3–7 of the Small Santiago tablet featured a compound glyph, 380.1.3 (a sitting figure 380 holding a rod 1 with a line of chevrons (a garland?) 3 ), repeated 31 times, each time followed by one to half a dozen glyphs before its next occurrence. He believed that this broke the text into sections containing the names of chiefs.[40] Barthel later found this pattern on tablet K, which is a paraphrase of Gr (in many of the K sequences the compound is reduced to 380.1 ), as well as on A, where it sometimes appears as 380.1.3 and sometimes as 380.1; on C, E, and S as 380.1; and, with the variant 380.1.52 , on N. In places it appears abbreviated as 1.3 or 1.52 , without the human figure, but parallels in the texts suggest these have the same separating function.[41] Barthel saw the sequence 380.1 as a tangata rongorongo (rongorongo expert) holding an inscribed staff like the Santiago Staff.[citation needed]
Kudrjavtsev et al.
During World War II, a small group of students in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad),
- Parallel texts: A short excerpt of tablets H, P, and Q
Barthel would later call this the "Grand Tradition", though its contents remain unknown.[citation needed]
The group later noticed that tablet K was a close paraphrase of the recto of G. Kudrjavtsev wrote up their findings, which were published posthumously.[42][citation not found] Numerous other parallel, though shorter, sequences have since been identified through statistical analysis, with texts N and R found to be composed almost entirely of phrases shared with other tablets, though not in the same order.[30][35][36]
Identifying such shared phrasing was one of the first steps in unraveling the structure of the script, as it is the best way to detect ligatures and allographs, and thus to establish the inventory of rongorongo glyphs.[citation needed]
- Ligatures: Parallel texts Pr4–5 (top) and Hr5 (bottom) show that a figure (glyph 200 ) holding an object (glyphs 8 , 1 , and 9 ) in P may be fused into a ligature in H, where the object replaces either the figure's head or its hand. (Elsewhere in these texts, animal figures are reduced to a distinctive feature such as a head or arm when they fuse with a preceding glyph.) Here also are the two hand shapes (glyphs 6 and 64 ) which would later be established as allographs. Three of the four human and turtle figures at left have arm ligatures with an orb (glyph 62 ), which Pozdniakov found often marks a phrase boundary.
Butinov and Knorozov
In 1957 the Russian epigraphers Nikolai Butinov and Yuri Knorozov (who in 1952 had provided the key insights that would later lead to the decipherment of the Maya writing system) suggested that the repetitive structure of a sequence of some fifteen glyphs on Gv5–6 (lines 5 and 6 of the verso of the Small Santiago Tablet) was compatible with a genealogy. It reads in part,[citation needed]
Now, if the repeated independent glyph 200 is a title, such as "king", and if the repeated attached glyph 76 is a patronymic marker, then this means something like:
- King A, B's son, King B, C's son, King C, D's son, King D, E's son,
and the sequence is a lineage.
Although no-one has been able to confirm Butinov and Knorozov's hypothesis, it is widely considered plausible.[30][37][2] If it is correct, then, first, we can identify other glyph sequences which constitute personal names. Second, the Santiago Staff would consist mostly of persons' names as it bears 564 occurrences of glyph 76, the putative patronymic marker, one fourth of the total of 2320 glyphs. Third, the sequence 606.76 700, translated by Fischer (below) as "all the birds copulated with the fish", would in reality mean (So-and-so) son of 606 was killed. The Santiago Staff, with 63 occurrences of glyph 700 , a rebus for îka "victim", would then be in part a kohau îka (list of war casualties).[43]
Barthel
German ethnologist Thomas Barthel, who first published the rongorongo corpus, identified three lines on the recto (side a) of tablet C, also known as Mamari, as a lunar calendar.[44] Guy proposed that it was more precisely an astronomical rule for whether one or two intercalary nights should be inserted into the 28-night Rapanui month to keep it in sync with the phases of the moon, and if one night, whether this should come before or after the full moon.[45][46] Berthin and Berthin propose that it is the text which follows the identified calendar that shows where the intercalary nights should appear.[37] The Mamari calendar is the only example of rongorongo whose function is currently accepted as being understood, though it cannot actually be read.[citation needed]
In Guy's interpretation, the core of the calendar is a series of 29 left-side crescents ("☾", colored red on the photo of the table at right) on either side of the full moon, , a pictogram of te nuahine kā ꞌumu ꞌa rangi kotekote 'the old woman lighting an earth oven in the kotekote sky'—the Man in the Moon of Oceanic mythology. These correspond to the 28 basic and two intercalary nights of the old Rapa Nui lunar calendar.[citation needed]
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
*ata dark moon, maharu waxing half, motohi full moon, rongo waning half, hotu & hiro intercalary days |
Heralding sequences: Two instances of the "heralding sequence" from line Ca7, one from before and one from after the full moon. The fish at the end of the latter is inverted, and (in the sequence immediately following the full moon only) the long-necked bird is reversed.
These thirty nights, starting with the new moon, are divided into eight groups by a "heralding sequence" of four glyphs (above, and colored purple on the tablet at right) which ends in the pictogram of a fish on a line (yellow). The heralding sequences each contain two right-side lunar crescents ("☽"). In all four heralding sequences preceding the full moon the fish is head up; in all four following it the fish is head down, suggesting the waxing and waning of the moon. The way the crescents are grouped together reflects the patterns of names in the old calendar. The two ☾ crescents at the end of the calendar, introduced with an expanded heralding sequence, represent the two intercalary nights held in reserve. The eleventh crescent, with the bulge, is where one of those nights is found in Thomson's and Métraux's records.[citation needed]
Guy notes that the further the Moon is from the Earth in its eccentric orbit, the
Seven of the calendrical crescents (red) are accompanied by other glyphs (green). Guy suggests syllabic readings for some of these, based on possible rebuses and correspondences with the names of the nights in the old calendar. The two sequences of six and five nights without such accompanying glyphs (beginning of line 7, and transition of lines 7–8) correspond to the two groups of six and five numbered kokore nights, which do not have individual names.[citation needed]
Fischer
In 1995 independent linguist Steven Fischer, who also claims to have deciphered the enigmatic Phaistos Disc, announced that he had cracked the rongorongo "code", making him the only person in history to have deciphered two such scripts.[47] In the decade since, this has not been accepted by other researchers, who feel that Fischer overstated the single pattern which formed the basis of his decipherment, and note that it has not led to an understanding of other patterns.[30][43][48][35][36][37]
Decipherment
Fischer notes that the long text of the 125-cm Santiago Staff is unlike other texts in that it appears to have punctuation: The 2,320-glyph text is divided by "103 vertical lines at odd intervals" which do not occur on any of the tablets. Fischer remarked that glyph 76 , identified as a possible patronymic marker by Butinov and Knorozov, is attached to the first glyph in each section of text, and that "almost all" sections contain a multiple of three glyphs, with the first bearing a 76 "suffix".[citation needed][note 16]
Fischer identified glyph 76 as a phallus and the text of the Santiago Staff as a creation chant consisting of hundreds of repetitions of X–phallus Y Z, which he interpreted as X copulated with Y, there issued forth Z. His primary example was this one:
about half-way through line 12 of the Santiago Staff. Fischer interpreted glyph 606 as "bird"+"hand", with the phallus attached as usual at its lower right; glyph 700 as "fish"; and glyph 8 as "sun".[note 17]
On the basis that the Rapanui word maꞌu "to take" is nearly homophonous with a plural marker mau, he posited that the hand of 606 was that plural marker, via a semantic shift of "hand" → "take", and thus translated 606 as "all the birds". Taking penis to mean "copulate", he read the sequence 606.76 700 8 as "all the birds copulated, fish, sun".[citation needed]
Fischer supported his interpretation by claiming similarities to the recitation Atua Matariri, so called from its first words, which was collected by William Thomson. This recitation is a litany where each verse has the form X, ki ꞌai ki roto ki Y, ka pû te Z, literally "X having been inside Y the Z comes forward". Here is the first verse, according to Salmon and then according to Métraux (neither of whom wrote glottal stops or long vowels):
Atua Matariri; Ki ai Kiroto, Kia Taporo, Kapu te Poporo.
"God Atua Matariri and goddess Taporo produced thistle."— Salmon
Atua-matariri ki ai ki roto ki a te Poro, ka pu te poporo.
"God-of-the-angry-look by copulating with Roundness (?) produced the poporo (black nightshade, Solanum nigrum)."— Métraux
Fischer proposed that the glyph sequence 606.76 700 8, literally MANU:MAꞋU.ꞋAI ÎKA RAꞋÂ "bird:hand.penis fish sun", had the analogous phonetic reading of:
te manu mau ki ꞌai ki roto ki te îka, ka pû te raꞌâ
"All the birds copulated with the fish; there issued forth the sun."
He claimed similar phallic triplets for several other texts. However, in the majority of texts glyph 76 is not common, and Fischer proposed that these were a later, more developed stage of the script, where the creation chants had been abbreviated to X Y Z and omit the phallus. He concluded that 85% of the rongorongo corpus consisted of such creation chants, and that it was only a matter of time before rongorongo would be fully deciphered.[51]
Objections
There are a number of objections to Fischer's approach:
- When Andrew Robinson checked the claimed pattern, he found that "Close inspection of the Santiago Staff reveals that only 63 out of the 113 [sic] sequences on the staff fully obey the triad structure (and 63 is the maximum figure, giving every Fischer attribution the benefit of the doubt)."[52] Glyph 76 occurs sometimes in isolation, sometimes compounded with itself, and sometimes in the 'wrong' part (or even all parts) of the triplets.[note 16] Other than on the Staff, Pozdniakov could find Fischer's triplets only in the poorly preserved text of Ta and in the single line of Gv which Butinov and Knorozov suggested might be a genealogy.[53]
- Pozdniakov and Pozdniakov calculated that altogether the four glyphs of Fischer's primary example make up 20% of the corpus. "Hence it is easy to find examples in which, on the contrary, 'the sun copulates with the fish', and sometimes also with the birds. Fischer does not mention the resulting chaos in which everything is copulating in all manner of unlikely combinations. Furthermore, it is by no means obvious in what sense this 'breakthrough' is 'phonetic'."[34]
- The plural marker mau does not exist in Rapanui, but is instead an element of Tahitian grammar. However, even if it did occur in Rapanui, Polynesian mau is only a plural marker when it precedes a noun; after a noun it is an adjective which means "true, genuine, proper".[43]
- No Polynesian myth tells of birds copulating with fish to produce the sun. Fischer justifies his interpretation thus: This is very close to [verse] number 25 from Daniel Ure Vaꞌe Iko's procreation chant [Atua Matariri] "Land copulated with the fish Ruhi Paralyzer: There issued forth the sun."[54] However, this claim depends on Salmon's English translation, which does not follow from his Rapanui transcription of
- Heima; Ki ai Kiroto Kairui Kairui-Hakamarui Kapu te Raa.[43]
- Métraux gives the following interpretation of that verse:
- He Hina [He ima?] ki ai ki roto kia Rui-haka-ma-rui, ka pu te raa.
- "Moon (?) by copulating with Darkness (?) produced Sun",[55]
- which mentions neither birds nor fish.
- Given Fischer's reading, Butinov and Knorozov's putative genealogy on tablet Gv becomes semantically odd, with several animate beings copulating with the same human figure to produce themselves:[43]
- [turtle] copulated with [man], there issued forth [turtle]
- [shark?] copulated with [man] there issued forth [shark]
- etc.[note 18]
- Cryptologist Tomi Melka deduced that Fischer's hypothesis cannot be true for the entire Staff, let alone other texts.[57]
- Computational linguist Richard Sproat could not replicate the parallels Fischer claimed between the Santiago Staff and the other texts. He automated the search for string matches between the texts and found that the staff stood alone:
As an attempt at a test for Fischer's "phallus omission" assumption, we computed the same string matches for a version of the corpus where glyph 76, the phallus symbol, had been removed. Presumably if many parts of the other tablets are really texts which are like the Santiago Staff, albeit sans explicit phallus, one ought to increase one's chance of finding matches between the Staff and other tablets by removing the offending member. The results were the same as for the unadulterated version of the corpus: the Santiago staff still appears as an isolate.
— Sproat 2003
Pozdniakov
In the 1950s, Butinov and Knorozov had performed a statistical analysis of several rongorongo texts and had concluded that either the language of the texts was not Polynesian, or that it was written in a condensed
In 2011, Pozdniakov released a pre-press publication analyzing Text E Keiti, including a glyph-by-glyph comparison of the transcription in Barthel (1958), with misidentified glyphs corrected per Horley (2010).[59]
Revising the glyph inventory
To resolve this deficiency, Pozdniakov (1996) reanalyzed thirteen of the better preserved texts, attempting to identify all ligatures and allographs in order to better approach a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and their numeric representation. He observed that all these texts but I and G verso consist predominantly of shared phrases (sequences of glyphs), which occur in different orders and contexts on different tablets.[note 19] By 2007 he had identified some one hundred shared phrases, each between ten and one hundred glyphs long. Even setting aside the completely parallel texts Gr–K and the 'Grand Tradition' of H–P–Q, he found that half of the remainder comprises such phrases:[citation needed]
Phrasing: Variants of this twenty-glyph phrase, all missing some of these glyphs or adding others, are found twelve times, in eight of the thirteen texts Pozdniakov tabulated: lines Ab4, Cr2–3, Cv2, Cv12, Ev3, Ev6, Gr2–3, Hv12, Kr3, Ra6, Rb6, and Sa1. Among other things, such phrases have established or confirmed the reading order of some of the tablets.[60]
These shared sequences begin and end with a notably restricted set of glyphs.[61] For example, many begin or end, or both, with glyph 62 (an arm ending in a circle: ) or with a ligature where glyph 62 replaces the arm or wing of a figure (see the ligature image under Kudrjavtsev et al.).[citation needed]
Contrasting these phrases allowed Pozdniakov to determine that some glyphs occur in apparent free variation both in isolation and as components of ligatures. Thus he proposed that the two hand shapes, 6 (three fingers and a thumb) and 64 (a four-fingered forked hand), are graphic variants of a single glyph, which also attaches to or replaces the arms of various other glyphs:[62]
Allographs: The 'hand' allographs (left), plus some of the fifty pairs of allographic 'hand' ligatures to which Barthel had assigned distinct character codes.
The fact the two hands appear to substitute for each other in all these pairs of glyphs when the repeated phrases are compared lends credence to their identity. Similarly, Pozdniakov proposed that the heads with "gaping mouths", as in glyph 380 , are variants of the bird heads, so that the entirety of Barthel's 300 and 400 series of glyphs are seen as either ligatures or variants of the 600 series.[63]
Despite finding that some of the forms Barthel had assumed were allographs appeared instead to be independent glyphs, such as the two orientations of his glyph 27, , the overall conflation of allographs and ligatures greatly reduced the size of Barthel's published 600-glyph inventory. By recoding the texts with these findings and then recomparing them, Pozdniakov was able to detect twice as many shared phrases, which enabled him to further consolidate the inventory of glyphs. By 2007, he and his father, a pioneer in Russian computer science, had concluded that 52 glyphs accounted for 99.7% of the corpus.[64][note 20] From this he deduced that rongorongo is essentially a syllabary, though mixed with non-syllabic elements, possibly determinatives or logographs for common words (see below). The data analysis, however, has not been published.[citation needed]
Pozdniakov's proposed basic inventory[citation needed] 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 14 15 16 22 25 27a 28 34 38 41 44 46 47 50 52 53 59 60 61 62 63 66 67 69 70 71 74 76 91 95 99 200 240 280 380 400 530 660 700 720 730 901 Glyph 901 was first proposed by Pozdniakov.[65] The inverted variant 27b in Barthel's glyph 27 () appears to be a distinct glyph. Although 99 looks like a ligature of 95 and 14 , statistically it behaves like a separate glyph, similar to how Latin Q and R do not behave as ligatures of O and P with an extra stroke, but as separate letters.[66]
The shared repetitive nature of the phrasing of the texts, apart from Gv and I, suggests to Pozdniakov that they are not integral texts, and cannot contain the varied contents which would be expected for history or mythology.[67][68] In the following table of characters in the Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov inventory, ordered by descending frequency, the first two rows of 26 characters account for 86% of the entire corpus.[69]
Notes
- ^ This was Text D Échancrée ("notched")[8]
- ^ Fischer believes he can date these sessions to August 1873[citation needed]
- Cypraea caputdraconis)]
- ^ "The Apai text".[18]
- ^ "The Atua Matariri text per Salmon".[19] and "as corrected by Métraux". Archived from the original on 2008-05-16.[20][page needed]
- ^ a b These chants are attributed to texts R and S in the published article. However, this may be an error: Thomson reported that Ure Vae Iko refused to chant from the original tablets and would use only photographs, but Thompson had just acquired R and S on Easter Island and had had no time to have photographs prepared. The photos Thompson published in 1891, besides R and S, were of B, C, D, E, and H, so it's possible the chants identified with R and S may have actually been of B or H, assuming the other chants were attributed properly.[citation needed]
- ^ "The Eaha to ran ariiki Kete text".[21]
- ^ "The Ka ihi uiga text".[22]
- ^ "The Ate-a-renga-hokau iti poheraa text".[23]
- ^ In Tahitian orthography, these are te reva farāni and hōroꞌa moni e faꞌahiti. Note that moni comes from English money,[24] and that /f/ does not exist in the Rapanui language. Fischer says:
Ure's so-called "Love Song" (Thomson, 1889:526), though an interesting example of a typical popular song on Rapanui in the 1880s, among Routledge's informants nearly 30 years later "was laughed out of court as being merely a love-song which everyone knew" (Routledge, 1919:248). Once again Ure's text dismisses itself because of its recent Tahitianisms: te riva forani, moni, and fahiti.[25]
- ^ Métraux's translation is "X by copulating with Y produced Z". However, Guy notes that the particle ka which Métraux took to be the past tense on produced is actually the imperative (the particle for past tense is ku); the phrase ki roto means "into" rather than "with"; and the verb ꞌai is transitive (coito, hacer coito los animales. [Es expresión grosera.] "coitus, for animals to have coitus [A rude expression.]"), so that the formula X ki ꞌai ki roto Y, ka pû te Z would be better translated as X, by mounting into Y, let Z come forth.[27][26]
- biangbiang noodles[citation needed].
- ^ a b c As translated by Pozdniakov (1996):
coupé canne à sucre rangi, igname tara, beaucoup coupé taro, des tiges (?), coupé igname, récolté, coupé igname, coupé, tiré, coupé honui, coupé canne à sucre, coupé, récolté, pris, kihi, choisi kihi, pris kihi...
— Pr1récolté igname, poporo, gourde, tiré igname, coupé, coupé une plante, coupé une plante, igname, coupé banane, récolté canne à sucre, coupé taro, coupé igname kahu, igname, igname, igname...
— Pv11racine, racine, racine, racine, racine, racine (c'est-à-dire beaucoup de racines), tubercule, pris, coupé tubercule de patate, déterré des pousses d'igname, tubercule d'igname, tubercule de patate, tubercule, ...
— Cr7 - ^ [I]ls ne sont pas accompagnés de la moindre justification.[39]
- ^ The first small crescent corresponds to the position of hotu in Thomson and Métraux.[citation needed]
- ^ a b See, for example, figure 2 of Fischer's on-line article,[49] at the start of line I5 (Fischer's line 8), where vertical bars delineate some of these X-Y-Z triplets. The pattern can be summarized as:
- | X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z A A | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z X.76(?) Y Z X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z Z | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y |,
- | X.76 76 Z.76 A B X.76 76 Z.76 |, etc.
- ^ In the Jaussen list, 600 (606 without the hand) is identified as a frigatebird or as a bird flying (p 4), 700 as a fish (p 4), and 8 variously as the sun, a star, or fire (pp 2–3). 76 is not identified.[50]
- ^ Fischer was familiar with Butinov and Knorozov's article, and describes their contribution as "a milestone in rongorongo studies". Yet he dismisses their hypothesis thus: "Unfortunately, [Butinov's] proof for this claim consisted again, as in 1956, of the "genealogy" which Butinov believed is inscribed on the verso of the "Small Santiago Tablet" [tablet Gv]. In actual fact, this text appears instead to be a procreation chant whose X1YZ structure radically differs from what Butinov has segmented for this text."[56]
- ^ Pozdniakov did not tabulate the short texts J, L, X; the fragments F, W, Y; the mostly obliterated texts M, O, T–V, Z; nor tablet D, though he did identify some sequences shared with Y and discussed possible reading orders of D. However, he notes that T shares short sequences with I and Gv rather than with the other texts.[53]
- hapax legomena. This analysis excluded the Santiago Staff, which contained another three or four frequent glyphs.[citation needed]
References
- ^ Englert 1970, p. 80.
- ^ a b Sproat 2007.
- ^ Comrie, Matthews & Polinsky 1996, p. 100.
- ^ a b Robinson 2007.
- ^ Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, pp. 4, 5.
- ^ a b Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 5.
- ^ Fischer 1997a.
- ^ a b c Fischer 1997a, p. 47.
- ^ "Easter Island Home Page". Archived from the original on 2008-04-13.
- ^ Barthel 1958, pp. 173–199.
- ^ Barthel 1958, p. 202.
- ^ Guy 1999a.
- ^ a b Guy 1992.
- ^ Métraux 1940, p. 52.
- ^ Barthel 1978, p. 48.
- ^ a b Thomson 1889, p. 515.
- ^ Fischer 1997a, pp. 88–89.
- ^ Thomson 1889, pp. 518–520.
- ^ Thomson 1889, pp. 520–522.
- ^ Métraux 1940.
- ^ Thomson 1889, p. 523.
- ^ Thomson 1889, p. 525.
- ^ Thomson 1889, p. 526.
- ^ "Dictionnaire en ligne tahitien-français". Archived from the original on 2008-04-05. Retrieved 2008-04-10.
- ^ Fischer 1997a, p. 101.
- ^ a b Englert 1993.
- ^ a b Guy 1999b.
- ^ Carter 2003.
- ^ Fischer 1997a, p. 147.
- ^ a b c d e Pozdniakov 1996.
- ^ Horley 2009.
- ^ Fedorova 1995.
- ^ Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 10.
- ^ a b Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 11.
- ^ a b c Sproat 2003.
- ^ a b c Horley 2005.
- ^ a b c d Berthin & Berthin 2006.
- ^ Guy 1990–2001, etc.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, p. 293.
- ^ Harrison 1874, p. 379.
- ^ Horley 2010.
- ^ Kudrjavtsev 1949.
- ^ a b c d e Guy 1998.
- ^ Barthel 1958, p. 242.
- ^ Guy 1990.
- ^ Guy 2001.
- ^ Bahn 1996.
- ^ Robinson 2002.
- ^ Fischer, figure 2 Archived 2008-05-15 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Jaussen List Archived 2009-04-08 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Fischer 1997a, p. 107.
- ^ Robinson 2002, p. 241.
- ^ a b Pozdniakov 1996, p. 290.
- ^ Fischer 1997b, p. 198.
- ^ Métraux 1940, p. 321.
- ^ Fischer 1997a, p. 198.
- ^ Melka 2009.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, p. 294.
- ^ Pozdniakov 2011.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, pp. 289, 295.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, pp. 299–300.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, p. 296.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, p. 297.
- ^ Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 8.
- ^ Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 22.
- ^ Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 35.
- ^ Pozdniakov 1996, p. 299.
- ^ Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007, p. 7.
- ^ Pozdniakov 2011, p. 7.
Bibliography
- Bahn, Paul (1996). "Cracking the Easter Island code". New Scientist. 150 (2034): 36–39.
- ISBN 978-3-11-164125-6.
- Barthel, Thomas S. (1978). The Eighth Land. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-8718-6.
- Berthin, Gordon; Berthin, Michael (2006). "Astronomical Utility and Poetic Metaphor in the Rongorongo Lunar Calendar". Applied Semiotics. 8 (18): 85–98. Archived from the original on 2008-02-24. Retrieved 2008-04-10.
- Butinov, Nikolai A.; Journal of the Polynesian Society. 66 (1): 5–17.
- Carroll, Alan (1892). "The Easter Island inscriptions, and the translation and interpretation of them". JSTOR 20701239.
- Carter, Jennifer M. T. (January 2003). "For the Sake of All Women". NLA News. VIII (4). Archived from the original on 2003-03-13.
- OCLC 32348570.
- Englert, Sebastián (1970). Island at the center of the world: new light on Easter Island. Scribner.
- Englert, Sebastián (1993). La tierra de Hotu Matuꞌa — Historia y Etnología de la Isla de Pascua, Gramática y Diccionario del antiguo idioma de la isla [The Land of Hotu Matuꞌa: History and Ethnology of Easter Island, Grammar and Dictionary of the Old Language of the Island] (in Spanish) (6th ed.). Editorial Universitaria.
- Fedorova, Irina (1995). Дощечки кохау ронгоронго из Кунсткамеры [The Kohau Rongorongo Tablets of the Kunstkamera] (in Russian). Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.
- Fischer, Steven Roger (1997a). Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Clarendon Press. OCLC 37260890.
- Fischer, Steven Roger (1997b). Glyph-breaker: A Decipherer's Story. Copernicus. OCLC 36672031.
- doi:10.3406/jso.1990.2882. Archived from the originalon 2008-03-13.
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- Guy, Jacques B. M. (1998). "Un prétendu déchiffrement des tablettes de l'île de Pâques" [A purported decipherment of the Easter Island tablets]. Journal de la Société des Océanistes (in French). 106 (1): 57–63. ISSN 0300-953X.
- Guy, Jacques B. M. (1999a). "Peut-on se fonder sur le témoignage de Métoro pour déchiffrer les rongo-rongo ?" [Can one rely on the testimony of Metoro to decipher rongorongo?]. Journal de la Société des Océanistes (in French). 108 (1): 125–132. ISSN 0300-953X.
- Guy, Jacques B. M. (1999b). "Letter to the CEIPP". Bulletin du Centre d'études sur l'île de Pâques et la Polynésie. 28.
- Guy, Jacques B. M. (2001). "Le calendrier de la tablette Mamari" [The Calendar of the Mamari Tablet]. Bulletin du Centre d'études sur l'île de Pâques et la Polynésie (in French). 47: 1–4.
- Harrison, James Park (1874). "The Hieroglyphics of Easter Island". JSTOR 2840910.
- de Hevesy, Guillaume (1932). "Lettre de M. de Hevesy sur une écriture mystérieuse du bassin de l'Indus" [Letter to Mr Pelliot on a mysterious script of the Indus Valley]. Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (in French). 76 (3): 310. .
- Horley, Paul (2005). "Allographic Variations and Statistical Analysis of the Rongorongo Script". Rapa Nui Journal. 19 (2): 107–116. S2CID 53658054.
- Horley, Paul (2009). "Review: Words out of wood: Proposals for the decipherment of the Easter Island script, by Mary de Laat" (PDF). Rapa Nui Journal. 23 (2): 165–168.
- Horley, Paul (2010). "Rongorongo tablet Keiti" (PDF). Rapa Nui Journal. 24 (1): 45–56.
- Kudrjavtsev, Boris G. (1949). "Сборник Музея Антропологии и Этнографии" [Compilation of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography]. Письменность острова Пасхи [The Writing of Easter Island] (in Russian). Vol. 11. Saint Petersburg. pp. 175–221.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - Melka, Tomi S. (2009). "Some Considerations about the Kohau Rongorongo Script in the Light of a Statistical Analysis of the 'Santiago Staff'". Cryptologia. 33 (1): 24–73. S2CID 34817582.
- Yale Review. 28 (4). New Haven: Yale University: 758–779. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2008-04-06.
- Métraux, Alfred (1940). "Ethnology of Easter Island". Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin. 160. Bernice P. Bishop Museum Press.
- Pozdniakov, Konstantin Igorevič (1996). "Les bases du déchiffrement de l'écriture de l'île de Pâques" [The Bases of Deciphering the Writing of Easter Island]. .
- Pozdniakov, Konstantin (2011). "Tablet Keiti and calendar-like structures in Rapanui script". Journal de la Société des Océanistes (132): 39–74. ISSN 0300-953X.
- Pozdniakov, Igor; Pozdniakov, Konstantin (2007). "Rapanui Writing and the Rapanui Language: Preliminary Results of a Statistical Analysis". Forum for Anthropology and Culture (3): 3–36.
- Robinson, Andrew (2002). Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-135743-2.
- Sproat, Richard (2003). "Approximate String Matches in the Rongorongo Corpus". Richard Sproat's personal website. Retrieved 2008-03-06.
- Sproat, Richard (2007). Rongorongo. LSA 369: Writing Systems. the Linguistic Society of America Institute: Stanford University. Archived from the original on 2007-05-04. Retrieved 2008-03-06.
- Robinson, Andrew (2007). Rongorongo. LSA 369: Writing Systems. the Linguistic Society of America Institute: Stanford University. Archived from the original on 2007-05-04. Retrieved 2008-03-06.
- Thomson, William J. (1889). "Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island". Report of the United States National Museum for the year ending June 30, 1889. Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution for 1889. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 447–552. hdl:10088/29921.
External links
- The Rongorongo of Easter Island. Provides primary sources: Eyraud, Pinart, William Thomson, George Cooke, Routledge; old decipherments; Barthel's encodings, line by line; all of Barthel's numbered glyphs; and an English translation of Englert's dictionary
- Stéphen Chauvet (1935) Easter Island and its Mysteries, with early photos of many of the tablets, as well as the Jaussen list (p. 1, p. 2, p. 3, p. 4). The section on rongorongo is here.
- Discussion by Steven Fischer, with critique by Jacques Guy
- Richard Sproat's site, with a concordance of matched sequences
- Konstantin Pozdniakov's site, with publications
- Rongorongo on Spanish Wikipedia, covering several additional attempts at decipherment.