Decipherment of rongorongo
Encyclopedia
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo
Rongorongo
Rongorongo is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that appears to be writing or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, not even...

 script of Easter Island
Easter Island
Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888, Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people...

 since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. As with most undeciphered scripts, many of the proposals have been fanciful. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar
Lunar calendar
A lunar calendar is a calendar that is based on cycles of the lunar phase. A common purely lunar calendar is the Islamic calendar or Hijri calendar. A feature of the Islamic calendar is that a year is always 12 months, so the months are not linked with the seasons and drift each solar year by 11 to...

, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, comprising only 15,000 legible glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....

s; the lack of context in which to interpret the texts, such as illustrations or parallels to texts which can be read; and the fact that the modern Rapanui language is heavily mixed with Tahitian
Tahitian language
Tahitian is an indigenous language spoken mainly in the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It is an Eastern Polynesian language closely related to the other indigenous languages spoken in French Polynesia: Marquesan, Tuamotuan, Mangarevan, and Austral Islands languages...

 and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets—especially if they record a specialized register
Register (sociolinguistics)
In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...

 such as incantations—while the few remaining examples of the old language are heavily restricted in genre and may not correspond well to the tablets either.

Since a proposal by Butinov and Knorozov in the 1950s, the majority of philologists, linguists and cultural historians have taken the line that rongorongo was not true writing but proto-writing, that is, an ideographic
Ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...

- and rebus
Rebus
A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames, for example in its basic form 3 salmon fish to denote the name "Salmon"...

-based mnemonic
Mnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...

 device, such as the Dongba script
Dongba script
The Dongba, Tomba or Tompa symbols are a system of pictographic glyphs used by the ²dto¹mba of the Naxi people in southern China. In the Naxi language it is called ²ss ³dgyu 'wood records' or ²lv ³dgyu 'stone records'. They are perhaps a thousand years old. The glyphs may be used as rebuses for...

 of the Naxi people, which would in all likelihood make it impossible to decipher. This skepticism is justified not only by the failure of the numerous attempts at decipherment, but by the extreme rarity of independent writing systems around the world. Of those who have attempted to decipher rongorongo as a true writing system, the vast majority have assumed it was logographic, a few that it was syllabic
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...

 or mixed. Statistically it appears to have been compatible with neither a pure logography nor a pure syllabary. The topic of the texts is unknown; various investigators have speculated they cover genealogy, navigation, astronomy, or agriculture. Oral history suggests that only a small elite were ever literate, and that the tablets were considered sacred.

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
Florentin-Étienne Jaussen
Monsignor Florentin-Étienne Jaussen was the first bishop of Tahiti and the man who brought the rongorongo script of Easter Island to the world's attention. In the 1860s Bishop Jaussen was responsible for ending the slave raids on Easter Island.Jaussen was born in Rocles, France...

, received a gift from recent converts on Easter Island: a long cord of human hair wound around a discarded rongorongo tablet.This was Text D Échancrée
Rongorongo text D
Text D of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Échancrée , is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. This is the tablet that started Jaussen's collection.-Other names:D is the standard designation, from Barthel...

 ("notched")
He immediately recognized the importance of the tablet, and asked Father Hippolyte Roussel
Hippolyte Roussel
Hippolyte Roussel was a French priest and missionary to Polynesia, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.In 1854 he was sent to evangelize in the Tuamotus and Mangareva in the Gambier Islands...

 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 Tau‘a Ure, who was said to know the inscriptions "by heart".

Sometime between 1869 and 1874, Jaussen worked with Metoro to decipher four of the tablets in his possession: A Tahua
Rongorongo text A
Text A of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Tahua, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:A is the standard designation, from Barthel...

,
B Aruku kurenga
Rongorongo text B
Text B of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Aruku Kurenga, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.Aruku Kurenga provided part of the "Jaussen List", a failed key of rongorongo glyphs...

,
C Mamari
Rongorongo text C
Text C of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Mamari, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It contains the Mamari Calendar.-Other names:C is the standard designation, from Barthel...

,
and E Keiti
Rongorongo text E
Text E of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Keiti, is one of two dozen known rongorongo texts, though it survives only in photographs and rubbings.-Other names:E is the standard designation, from Barthel...

.
Fischer believes he can date these sessions to August 1873 A list of the glyphs they identified was published posthumously, along with a complete account of the chants for A and B. This is the famous Jaussen list. Though at first taken for a Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek...

 of rongorongo, it has not led to an understanding of the script. It has been criticized for, among other inadequacies, glossing five glyphs as "porcelain
Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including clay in the form of kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between and...

", a material not found on Easter Island. However, this is a mistranslation: Jaussen glossed the five glyphs as porcelaine, French for both "cowrie" and the cowrie-like Chinese ceramic which is called porcelain in English. Jaussen's Rapanui gloss, pure, means specifically "cowrie".

Almost a century later, Thomas Barthel
Thomas Barthel
Thomas Sylvester Barthel was a German ethnologist and epigrapher who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered rongorongo script of Easter Island....

 published some of Jaussen's notes. 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. Jacques Guy
Jacques Guy
Jacques Guy is a French linguist, born in 1944 and living in Australia since 1968. He started undergraduate studies at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, focusing on Chinese, Japanese and Tahitian. He then wrote his Ph.D...

 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.

Thomson

William J. Thomson, paymaster on the USS Mohican
USS Mohican (1883)
The second USS Mohican was a steam sloop of war in the United States Navy. She was named for the Mohican tribe.-Construction:Mohican was laid down by Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 4 September 1872, funded with the repair money allocated for the first ; launched 27 December 1883; sponsored by...

, 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.

Ancient calendar

Among the ethnographic data Thomson collected were the names of the nights of the lunar month
Lunar month
In lunar calendars, a lunar month is the time between two identical syzygies . There are many variations. In Middle-Eastern and European traditions, the month starts when the young crescent moon becomes first visible at evening after conjunction with the Sun one or two days before that evening...

 and of the months of the year. This is key to interpreting the single identifiable sequence of rongorongo, and is notable in that it contains thirteen months; other sources mention only twelve. Métraux criticizes Thomson for translating Anakena as August when in 1869 Roussel identified it as July, and Barthel restricts his work to Métraux and Englert, because they are in agreement while "Thomson's list is off by one month". However, Guy calculated the dates of the new moon for years 1885 to 1887 and showed that Thomson's list fit the phases of the moon for 1886. He concluded that the ancient Rapanui used a lunisolar calendar
Lunisolar calendar
A lunisolar calendar is a calendar in many cultures whose date indicates both the moon phase and the time of the solar year. If the solar year is defined as a tropical year then a lunisolar calendar will give an indication of the season; if it is taken as a sidereal year then the calendar will...

 with kotuti as its embolismic month (its "leap month"), and that Thomson chanced to land on Easter Island in a year with a leap month.

Ure Va‘e Iko's recitations

Thomson was told of an old man called Ure Va‘e Iko who "professes to have been under instructions in the art of hieroglyphic reading at the time of the Peruvian raids, and claims to understand most of the characters". He had been the steward of King Nga‘ara
King Nga'ara
Nga‘araThe name Nga‘ara has been variously spelled Gnaara, Gaara, Ngaara, Nga-Ara, Gahara, and Gobara. The letter g is a common convention in the Pacific for the ng-sound , and Roussel, the one who transcribed the name as Gahara, frequently used h for glottal stop...

, the last king said to have had knowledge of writing, and although he was not able to write himself, he knew many of the rongorongo chants and was able to read at least one memorized text. When Thomson plied him with gifts and money to read the two tablets he had purchased, Ure "declined most positively to ruin his chances for salvation by doing what his Christian instructors had forbidden" and finally fled. However, Thomson had taken photographs of Jaussen's tablets when the USS Mohican was in Tahiti, and he eventually cajoled Ure into reading from those photographs. The English-Tahitian landowner Alexander Salmon
Alexander Salmon, Jr
Alexander Ariipaea Vehiaitipare Salmon Jr. was the English-Jewish-Tahitian co-owner of the Maison Brander plantations on Tahiti and de facto ruler of Easter Island from 1878 till its cession to Chile in 1888.-Family:...

 took down Ure's dictation, which he later translated into English, for the following tablets:
Ure Va‘e Iko's readings
Recitation Corresponding tablet
Apai E (Keiti)
Rongorongo text E
Text E of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Keiti, is one of two dozen known rongorongo texts, though it survives only in photographs and rubbings.-Other names:E is the standard designation, from Barthel...

Atua Matariri R (Small Washington)
Rongorongo text R
Text R of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Small Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:...

 ?
Eaha to ran ariiki Kete S (Great Washington)
Rongorongo text S
Text S of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Great or Large Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:...

 ?
Ka ihi uiga D (Échancrée)
Rongorongo text D
Text D of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Échancrée , is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. This is the tablet that started Jaussen's collection.-Other names:D is the standard designation, from Barthel...

Ate-a-renga-hokau iti poheraa C (Mamari)
Rongorongo text C
Text C of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Mamari, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It contains the Mamari Calendar.-Other names:C is the standard designation, from Barthel...



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.
The very title is a mixture of Rapanui and Tahitian: pohera‘a is Tahitian for "death"; the Rapanui word is matenga. Ure was an unwilling informant: Even with duress, Thomson was only able to gain his cooperation with "the cup that cheers" (that is, rum):

It is not surprising that information provided by an uncooperative and increasingly drunk informant should be compromised.

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. The verses of Atua Matariri are of the form X ki ‘ai ki roto Y, ka pû te Z "X, by mounting into Y, let Z come forth",
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 creation chants, with various beings begetting additional beings. However, they do not conform to Rapanui or other Polynesian creation mythology. Guy notes that the phrasing is similar to the way compound Chinese character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

s are described. For example, the composition of the Chinese character 銅 tóng "copper" may be described as "add 同 tóng to 金 jīn to make 銅 tóng" (meaning "add Together to Metal to make Copper"), which is also nonsense when taken literally. He hypothesizes that the Atua Matariri chant which Ure had heard in his youth, although unconnected to the particular tablet for which he recited it, was a genuine rongorongo chant: A mnemonic which taught students how the glyphs were composed.

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.

In 1892 the Australian pediatrician Alan Carroll published a fanciful translation, based on the idea that the texts were written by an extinct "Long-Ear
Hanau epe
The Hanau epe or Long-ears were a group of semi-legendary people who are said to have arrived at Easter Island. According to some theories , they were a South American indigenous people, but most evidence suggests that the original Easter Islanders were Polynesian in origin.Sebastian Englert states...

" population of Easter Island in a diverse mixture of Quechua
Quechua languages
Quechua is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably...

 and other languages of Peru and Mesoamerica. Perhaps due to the cost of casting special type
Movable type
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....

 for rongorongo, no method, analysis, or sound values of the individual glyphs were ever published. Carroll continued to publish short communications in Science of Man, the journal of the (Royal) Anthropological Society of Australasia
Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia
The Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia was established in 1885 as the Anthropological Society of Australasia by the Australian physician Alan Carroll. The prefix 'Royal' was added in 1901...

  until 1908. Carroll had himself founded the society, which is "nowadays seen as forming part of the 'lunatic fringe'."

In 1932 the Hungarian Vilmos Hevesy (Guillaume de Hevesy) published an article claiming a relationship between rongorongo and the Indus Valley script, based on superficial similarities of form. This was not a new idea, but was now presented to the French Academy of Inscriptions and Literature
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is a French learned society devoted to the humanities, founded in February 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.-History:...

 by the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot
Paul Pelliot
Paul Pelliot was a French sinologist and explorer of Central Asia. Initially intending to enter the foreign service, Pelliot took up the study of Chinese and became a pupil of Sylvain Lévi and Édouard Chavannes....

 and picked up by the press. Due to the lack of an accessible rongorongo corpus for comparison, it was not apparent that several of the rongorongo glyphs illustrated in Hevesy's publications were spurious. Despite the fact that both scripts were undeciphered (as they are to this day), separated by half the world and half of history (19000 km (11,806.1 mi) and 4000 years), and had no known intermediate stages, Hevesy's ideas were taken seriously enough in academic circles to prompt a 1934 Franco–Belgian expedition to Easter Island led by Lavachery
Henri Lavachery
Henri Alfred Lavachery was a Belgian archeologist and ethnologist. In 1934, he became the first professional archaeologist to visit Easter Island, and was later known for his study of its art...

 and Métraux
Alfred Metraux
Alfred Métraux was a Swiss anthropologist and human rights leader.-Early life:Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Metraux spent much of his childhood in Argentina where his father was a well known surgeon resident in Mendoza. His mother was a Georgian from Tbilisi...

 to debunk them (Métraux 1939). The Indus Valley connection was published as late as 1938 in such respected anthropological journals as Man
Man (journal)
Man was a journal of anthropological research, published in London between 1901–1994 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. For first sixty-three volumes from its inception in 1901 up to 1963 it was issued on a monthly basis, moving to bi-monthly issue for the...

.


At least a score of decipherments have been claimed since then, none of which have been accepted by other rongorongo epigraphers.
For instance, linguist Irina Fedorova published purported translations of the two St Petersburg tablets and portions of four others. More rigorous than most attempts, she restricts each glyph to a single logographic
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...

 reading. However, the results make little sense as texts. For example, tablet P
Rongorongo text P
Text P of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in St Petersburg and therefore also known as the Great or Large St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.-Other names:P is the standard designation,...

 begins (with each rongorongo ligature marked by a comma in the translation):

and continues in this vein to the end:

The other texts are similar. For example, the Mamari calendar makes no mention of time or the moon in Fedorova's account:

which even Fedorova characterized as "worthy of a maniac".

Moreover, the allographs detected by Pozdniakov are given different readings by Fedorova, so that, for example, otherwise parallel texts repeatedly substitute the purported verb "take" for the purported noun "a kind of yam". (Pozdniakov has demonstrated that these are graphic variants of the same glyph.) As it was, Fedorova's catalog consisted of 130 glyphs; Pozdniakov's additional allography would have made her interpretation even more repetitive. Such extreme repetition is a problem with all attempts to read rongorongo as a logographic script.

Many recent scholars 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 Fischer below, "are not accompanied by the least justification". All fail the key test of decipherment: a meaningful application to novel texts and patterns.

Harrison

James Park Harrison, a council member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is the world's longest established anthropological organization, with a global membership. Since 1843, it has been at the forefront of new developments in anthropology and new means of communicating them to a broad audience...

, noticed that lines Gr3–7 of the Small Santiago tablet
Rongorongo text G
Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:...

 featured a compound glyph, (a sitting figure holding a rod with a line of chevrons (a garland?) 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. 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 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 on N. In places it appears abbreviated as or without the human figure, but parallels in the texts suggest these have the same separating function. Barthel saw the sequence as a tangata rongorongo (rongorongo expert) holding an inscribed staff like the Santiago Staff.

Kudrjavtsev et al.

During World War II, a small group of students in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), Boris Kudrjavtsev, Valeri Chernushkov, and Oleg Klitin, became interested in tablets P
Rongorongo text P
Text P of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in St Petersburg and therefore also known as the Great or Large St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.-Other names:P is the standard designation,...

, and Q
Rongorongo text Q
Text Q of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in St Petersburg and therefore also known as the Small St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'....

, which they saw on display at the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology. They discovered that they bore, with minor variation, the same text, which they later found on tablet H
Rongorongo text H
Text H of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Great or Large Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.-Other names:H is the standard designation, from...

 as well:

Parallel texts: A short excerpt of tablets H, P, and Q


Barthel would later call this the "Grand Tradition", though its contents remain unknown.

The group later noticed that tablet K
Rongorongo text K
Text K of the rongorongo corpus, also known as the London tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and nearly duplicates the recto of tablet G.-Other names:...

 was a close paraphrase of the recto of G
Rongorongo text G
Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:...

. Kudrjavtsev wrote up their findings, which were published posthumously. Numerous other parallel, though shorter, sequences have since been identified through statistical analysis, with texts N
Rongorongo text N
Text N of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Vienna and therefore also known as the Small Vienna tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and repeats much of the verso of tablet E.-Other names:...

 and R
Rongorongo text R
Text R of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Small Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:...

 found to be composed almost entirely of phrases shared with other tablets, though not in the same order.

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.
Ligatures: Parallel texts Pr4–5 (top) and Hr5 (bottom) show that a figure (glyph holding an object and 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 and which would later be established as allographs. Three of the four human and turtle figures at left have arm ligatures with an orb (glyph 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 which would later lead to the decipherment of the Maya writing system
Maya script
The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...

) 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
Rongorongo text G
Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:...

) was compatible with a genealogy. It reads in part,


Now, if the repeated independent glyph is a title, such as "king", and if the repeated attached glyph is a patronymic
Patronymic
A patronym, or patronymic, is a component of a personal name based on the name of one's father, grandfather or an even earlier male ancestor. A component of a name based on the name of one's mother or a female ancestor is a matronymic. Each is a means of conveying lineage.In many areas patronyms...

 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. 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 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 a rebus for îka "victim", would then be in part a kohau îka (list of war casualties).

Barthel

German ethnologist Thomas Barthel
Thomas Barthel
Thomas Sylvester Barthel was a German ethnologist and epigrapher who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered rongorongo script of Easter Island....

, who first published the rongorongo corpus, identified three lines on the recto (side a) of tablet C
Rongorongo text C
Text C of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Mamari, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It contains the Mamari Calendar.-Other names:C is the standard designation, from Barthel...

, also known as Mamari, as a lunar calendar. Guy proposed that it was more precisely an astronomical rule for whether one or two intercalary
Intercalation
Intercalation is the insertion of a leap day, week or month into some calendar years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. Lunisolar calendars may require intercalations of both days and months.- Solar calendars :...

 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. Berthin and Berthin propose that it is the text which follows the identified calendar which shows where the intercalary nights should appear. The Mamari calendar is the only example of rongorongo whose function is currently accepted as being understood, though it cannot actually be read.

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 ‘umu ‘a rangi kotekote 'the old woman lighting an earth oven in the kotekote sky'—the Man in the Moon
Man in the Moon
The Man in the Moon is an imaginary figure resembling a human face, head or body, that observers from some cultural backgrounds typically perceive in the bright disc of the full moon...

 of Oceanic mythology. These correspond to the 28 basic and two intercalary nights of the old Rapa Nui lunar calendar
Rapa Nui calendar
The Rapa Nui calendar was the indigenous lunisolar calendar of Easter Island. It is now obsolete.-Attestation:William J. Thomson, paymaster on the USS Mohican, spent twelve days on Easter Island from December 19 to 30, 1886...

.

 
The old calendar
Rapa Nui calendar
The Rapa Nui calendar was the indigenous lunisolar calendar of Easter Island. It is now obsolete.-Attestation:William J. Thomson, paymaster on the USS Mohican, spent twelve days on Easter Island from December 19 to 30, 1886...

Day & name | Day & name
*1 ata *15 motohi
2 ari (hiro) 16 kokore 1
3 kokore 1 17 kokore 2
4 kokore 2 18 kokore 3
5 kokore 3 19 kokore 4
6 kokore 4 20 kokore 5
7 kokore 5 21 tapume
8 kokore 6 22 matua
*9 maharu *23 rongo
10 hua 24 rongo tane
11 atua 25 mauri nui
*x hotu 26 mauri kero
12 maure 27 mutu
13 ina-ira 28 tireo
14 rakau *x hiro
*ata dark moon
Dark moon
A dark moon describes the Moon during that time that it is invisible against the backdrop of the Sun in the sky. The duration of a dark moon is between 1.5 and 3.5 days, depending on the orientation of the Earth and Sun....

, maharu waxing half
Lunar phase
A lunar phase or phase of the moon is the appearance of the illuminated portion of the Moon as seen by an observer, usually on Earth. The lunar phases change cyclically as the Moon orbits the Earth, according to the changing relative positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun...

,
motohi full moon
Full moon
Full moon lunar phase that occurs when the Moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. More precisely, a full moon occurs when the geocentric apparent longitudes of the Sun and Moon differ by 180 degrees; the Moon is then in opposition with the Sun.Lunar eclipses can only occur at...

, rongo waning half
Lunar phase
A lunar phase or phase of the moon is the appearance of the illuminated portion of the Moon as seen by an observer, usually on Earth. The lunar phases change cyclically as the Moon orbits the Earth, according to the changing relative positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun...

,
hotu & hiro intercalary days
Intercalation
Intercalation is the insertion of a leap day, week or month into some calendar years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. Lunisolar calendars may require intercalations of both days and months.- Solar calendars :...

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.

Guy notes that the further the Moon is from the Earth in its eccentric orbit, the slower it moves
Kepler's laws of planetary motion
In astronomy, Kepler's laws give a description of the motion of planets around the Sun.Kepler's laws are:#The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci....

, and the more likely the need to resort to an intercalary night to keep the calendar in sync with its phases. He hypothesizes that the "heralding sequences" are instructions to observe the apparent diameter of the Moon, and that the half-size superscripted crescents (orange) preceding the sixth night before and sixth night after the full moon represent the small apparent diameter at apogee which triggers intercalation. (The first small crescent corresponds to the position of hotu in Thomson and Métraux.)

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.

Fischer

In 1995 independent linguist Steven Fischer, who also claims to have deciphered the enigmatic Phaistos Disc
Phaistos Disc
The Phaistos Disc is a disk of fired clay from the Minoan palace of Phaistos on the Greek island of Crete, possibly dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age . It is about 15 cm in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols...

, announced that he had cracked the rongorongo "code", making him the only person in history to have deciphered two such scripts. 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.

Decipherment

Fischer notes that the long text of the 125-cm Santiago Staff
Rongorongo text I
Text I of the rongorongo corpus, also known as the Santiago Staff, is the longest of the two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. Statistical analysis suggests that its contents are distinct.-Other names:...

 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 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".

Fischer identified glyph 76 as a phallus
Phallus
A phallus is an erect penis, a penis-shaped object such as a dildo, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. Any object that symbolically resembles a penis may also be referred to as a phallus; however, such objects are more often referred to as being phallic...

 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".

On the basis that the Rapanui word ma‘u "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".

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 ‘ai 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):

Fischer proposed that the glyph sequence 606.76 700 8, literally MANU:MA‘U.‘AI ÎKA RA‘Â "bird:hand.penis fish sun", had the analogous phonetic reading of:
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.

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)." Glyph occurs sometimes in isolation, sometimes compounded with itself, and sometimes in the 'wrong' part (or even all parts) of the triplets. 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.
  • 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'."
  • 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's an adjective which means "true, genuine, proper".
  • 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 Va‘e Iko's procreation chant [Atua Matariri] "Land copulated with the fish Ruhi Paralyzer: There issued forth the sun." 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.

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",

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:

[turtle] copulated with [man], there issued forth
[turtle]
[shark?] copulated with [man] there issued forth
[shark]
etc.
  • Cryptologist Tomi Melka deduced that Fischer's hypothesis cannot be true for the entire Staff, let alone other texts.
  • 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
    Approximate string matching
    In computing, approximate string matching is the technique of finding strings that match a pattern approximately...

     between the texts and found that the staff stood alone:

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 telegraphic style, because it contained no glyphs comparable in frequency to Polynesian grammatical particle
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...

s such as the Rapanui articles
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...

 te and he or the preposition ki. These findings have since been used to argue that rongorongo is not a writing system at all, but mnemonic
Mnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...

 proto-writing. However, Butinov and Knorozov had used Barthel's preliminary encoding, which Konstantin Pozdniakov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....

 in Saint Petersburg, noted was inappropriate for statistical analysis. The problem, as Butinov and Knorozov, and Barthel himself, had admitted, was that in many cases distinct numerical codes had been assigned to ligatures and allographs, as if these were independent glyphs. The result was that while Barthel's numerical transcription of a text enabled a basic discussion of its contents for the first time, it failed to capture its linguistic structure and actually interfered with inter-text comparison.

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).

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. 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:
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.


These shared sequences begin and end with a notably restricted set of glyphs. 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.).

Contrasting these phrases allowed Pozdniakov to determine that some glyphs occur in apparent free variation
Free variation
Free variation in linguistics is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers...

 both in isolation and as components of ligatures. Thus he proposed that the two hand shapes, (three fingers and a thumb) and (a four-fingered forked hand), are graphic variants of a single glyph, which also attaches to or replaces the arms of various other glyphs:
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 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.

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. From this he deduced that rongorongo is essentially a syllabary
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...

, though mixed with non-syllabic elements, possibly determinatives or logographs for common words (see below). The data analysis, however, has not been published.
Pozdniakov's proposed basic inventory
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 14 15 16
22 25 27AB 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 was first proposed by Pozdniakov. 27 is thought to be two glyphs,
. Although looks like a ligature of and 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.


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. 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.

Statistical evidence

With a rigorously derived inventory, Pozdniakov was able to test his ideas about the nature of the script. He tabulated the frequency distributions
Probability distribution
In probability theory, a probability mass, probability density, or probability distribution is a function that describes the probability of a random variable taking certain values....

 of glyphs in ten texts (excluding the divergent Santiago Staff) and found that they coincided with the distribution of syllables in ten archaic Rapanui texts such as the Apai recitation, with nearly identical deviations from an ideal Zipfian distribution. He took this as evidence both for rongorongo being essentially syllabic and for its being consistent with the Rapanui language. For example, the most common glyph, 6, and the most common syllable, /a/, both make up 10% of their corpora; the syllables te and he, which Butinov and Knorozov found so problematic, could at 5.7% and 3.5% be associated with any number of common rongorongo glyphs. In addition, the numbers of glyphs linked or fused together closely match the numbers of syllables in Rapanui words, both in the texts overall and in their respective lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

s, suggesting that each combination of glyphs represents a word:
Distribution of words and ligatures by size
Syllables per word;
Glyphs per ligature
| Full texts | Lexicon
Rapanui Rongorongo Rapanui Rongorongo
(n = 6847) (n = 6779) (n = 1047) (n = 1461)
one 42% 45% 3.7% 3.5%
two 36% 32% 40% 35%
three 15% 18% 33% 41%
four or more 7.1% 5.2% 23% 21%
(average) 1.9 syllables 1.9 glyphs 2.8 syllables 2.8 glyphs


In both corpora there were many more monosyllables/single glyphs in running text than in the lexicon. That is, in both a relatively small number of such forms are very frequent, suggesting that rongorongo is compatible with Rapanui, which has a small number of very frequent monosyllabic grammatical particles. Rongorongo and Rapanui are also almost identical in the proportion of syllables/glyphs found in isolation and in initial, medial, and final position within a word/ligature.

However, while such statistical tests demonstrate that rongorongo is consistent with a syllabic Rapanui script, syllables are not the only thing which can produce this result. In the Rapanui texts, some two dozen common polysyllabic words, such as ariki 'leader', ingoa 'name', and rua 'two', have the same frequency as a score of syllables, while other syllables such as /tu/ are less frequent than these words.

This suspicion that rongorongo may not be fully syllabic is supported by positional patterns within the texts. The distributions of Rapanui syllables within polysyllabic words and of rongorongo glyphs within ligatures are very similar, strengthening the syllabic connection. However, monosyllabic words and isolated glyphs behave very differently; here rongorongo does not look at all syllabic. For example, all glyphs but are attested in isolation, whereas only half of the 55 Rapanui syllables occur as monosyllabic words. Furthermore, among those syllables which do occur in isolation, their rate of doing so is much lower than that of the glyphs: Only three syllables, /te/, /he/, and /ki/, occur more than half the time in isolation (as grammatical particles), whereas a score of glyphs are more commonly found in isolation than not. Contextual analysis may help explain this: Whereas Rapanui monosyllables are grammatical particles and generally precede polysyllabic nouns and verbs, so that monosyllables rarely occur together, isolated rongorongo glyphs are usually found together, suggesting a very different function. Pozdniakov hypothesizes that the difference may be due to the presence of determinative
Determinative
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and...

s, or that glyphs have dual functions, as phonograms
Phonogram (linguistics)
A phonogram is a grapheme which represents a phoneme or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the Japanese kana...

 in combination but as logogram
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...

s in isolation, parallel to the Maya script
Maya script
The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...

. On the other hand, no glyph approaches the frequency, when in isolation, of the articles te and he or the preposition ki in running text. It may be that these particles were simply not written, but Pozdniakov suspects that they were written together with the following word, as is the case with prepositions and articles in Classical Latin
Classical Latin
Classical Latin in simplest terms is the socio-linguistic register of the Latin language regarded by the enfranchised and empowered populations of the late Roman republic and the Roman empire as good Latin. Most writers during this time made use of it...

 and written Arabic.

Further complicating this picture are repetition patterns. There are two types of repetition in Rapanui words: double syllables within roots, as in mamari, and grammatical reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....

 of disyllables, as seen in rongorongo. In the Rapanui lexicon, double syllables as in mamari are 50% more likely than chance can explain. However, in the rongorongo texts, analogous double AA glyphs are only 8% more likely than chance. Similarly, in the Rapanui lexicon reduplicated disyllables such as rongorongo are seven times as common as chance, constituting a quarter of the vocabulary, whereas, in rongorongo texts, ABAB sequences are only twice as likely as chance, and 10% of the vocabulary. If rongorongo is a phonetic script, therefore, this discrepancy needs to be explained. Pozdniakov suggests that perhaps there was a 'reduplicator' glyph, or that modifications of glyphs, such as facing heads to the left rather than to the right, may have indicated repetition.

Sound values

The results of statistical analysis will be strongly affected by any errors in identifying the inventory of glyphs, as well as by divergence from a purely syllabic representation, such as a glyph for reduplication. There are also large differences in the frequencies of individual syllables among the Rapanui texts, which makes any direct identification problematic. While Pozdniakov has not been able to assign any phonetic values with any certainty, statistical results do place constraints on which values are possible.

One possibility for a logogram of the most common word in Rapanui, the article te, is the most common glyph, which does not pattern like a phonogram. Glyph 200 occurs mostly in initial position and is more frequent in running text than any syllable in the Rapanui lexicon, both characteristics of the article. A possibility for a reduplicator glyph is which is also very common and does not pattern like a phonogram, but occurs predominantly in final position.

Because a repeated word or phrase, such as the ubiquitous ki ‘ai ki roto in the Atua Matariri recitation, will skew the statistics of that text, phonetic frequencies are best compared using word lists (considering each word individually) rather than the full texts. Pozdniakov used a few basic correlations between Rapanui and rongorongo to help narrow down the possible phonetic values of the glyphs. For instance, the relative frequencies of rongorongo glyphs in initial, medial, and final position in a ligature presumably constrain their possible sound values to syllables with similar distributions within the lexicon. Syllables beginning with ng, for example, are more common at the ends of words than in initial position. The overall frequencies, and the patterns of doubling and reduplication, on the other hand, seem to associate arm glyphs specifically with vocalic syllables:
  • Overall frequency. Syllables without a consonant (vocalic syllables) are more common in Rapanui than syllables beginning with any of the ten consonants. Of the vowels, /a/ is more than twice as frequent as any of the others. Thus the syllables comprising more than 3% of the Rapanui lexicon are /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/; /ta/, /ra/, /ka/, /na/, /ma/; and /ri/. (The three most common, the vocalic syllables /a/, /i/, /u/, comprise a full quarter of the corpus.) The glyphs comprising more than 3% of the rongorongo corpus are, in order, or As noted above, 200 and 3 do not pattern as phonograms. Of the remaining five, four are limbs (arms or wings).
  • Reduplication. In grammatical reduplication, vowels are also the most common syllables; so are the glyphs all limbs.
  • Doubling. Among doubled syllables, however, vocalic syllables are much less common. Four syllables, /i/, /a/, /u/, /ma/, are less commonly doubled than chance would dictate. Three glyphs are less common when doubled than chance as well: and two of them limbs.

Potential vocalic syllables
Most frequent
Most reduplicated
Least doubled
Sound value? /a/? /i/?


The exceptionally high frequencies of glyph and of the syllable /a/, everywhere except when doubled, suggest that glyph 6 may have the sound value /a/. Pozdniakov proposes with less confidence that the second most extreme glyph, might have the sound value /i/.

Objections

As Pozdniakov readily admits, his analysis is highly sensitive to the accuracy of the glyph inventory. Since he has not published the details of how he established this inventory, it is not possible for others to verify his work.

As of 2008, there has been little response to Pozdniakov's approach. However, Sproat (2007) believes that the results from the frequency distributions are nothing more than an effect of Zipf's Law, and furthermore that neither rongorongo nor the old texts were representative of the Rapanui language, so that a comparison between them is unlikely to be enlightening.

De Laat

Another decipherment, self-published
Vanity press
A vanity press or vanity publisher is a term describing a publishing house that publishes books at the author's expense. Publisher Johnathon Clifford claims to have coined the term in 1959. However, the term appears in mainstream U.S...

 by Mary de Laat in 2009, covers three texts, A
Rongorongo text A
Text A of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Tahua, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:A is the standard designation, from Barthel...

, B
Rongorongo text B
Text B of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Aruku Kurenga, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.Aruku Kurenga provided part of the "Jaussen List", a failed key of rongorongo glyphs...

, and E
Rongorongo text E
Text E of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Keiti, is one of two dozen known rongorongo texts, though it survives only in photographs and rubbings.-Other names:E is the standard designation, from Barthel...

. All three are proposed to consist of nothing but extended dialogue. Horley (2010) is a critical review.

De Laat proposes that the script consists of 50–60 basic glyphs, which fuse together and form ligatures as in earlier proposals. 35 of these are identified with specific syllables, largely completing a 45-unit CV syllabary in which vowel length, /h/, and glottal stop are not distinguished. Thus glyph , identified as /ta/, may also be used for /taa/, /taha/, or /taʔa/, though the history of how those glyphs were identified is not presented. A dozen of the sound values have proposed pictographic etymologies. For example, /ta/ would be from taha 'frigatebird' and /ka/ from ika 'fish'. This syllabary is supplemented by several disyllabic glyphs for common grammatical particles, haka "to do", mai "from, since", nei "this, here", kai "eat" (used in negation), ina "no, none", and tou (plural). Other than nui "big, great" and the oddly specific glyph vae (vae "to choose" ~ vaʻe "a foot"), none of the glyphs are used logographically or as a rebus. The proposed sound values are incompatible with Pozdniakov in some cases. For instance, to the two hand shapes and , which Pozdniakov among others demonstrated are allographs, de Laat assigns different sound values, /i, hi, ʔi/ and /ki/, respectively; in other cases, glyphs not identified as allographs in any statistical study are given the same sound value by de Laat. Fused glyphs are not read in any one direction: they may be top to bottom, bottom to top, or even both within a single fused glyph.

The handling of reduplication is novel. De Laat proposes that it was indicated in either of two ways: Iconically, by writing a glyph twice, as in , or through hatching
Hatching
Hatching is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing closely spaced parallel lines...

 or cross-hatching, as in or , any of which would be read /kaka/. The glyph that most frequently appears hatched is /a, ha, ʔa/, common on the Staff, which de Laat proposes is the interrogative and purportedly relative pronoun aha "which?, what?". However, many glyphs which are commonly found doubled, such as , never occur hatched, and de Laat does not address this discrepancy.

Although this relative-pronoun reading of 1-1 aha "which?" is the basis of several of de Laat's translations, it does not actually function as a relative pronoun in the Rapa Nui language. For example, de Laat reads one line as anga matea i aha te tae haaauraa "[they] create a [state of] lifelessness, for which [there is] no explanation!" Apart from the grammatical problem of the pronoun, the final word, haaauraa "meaning, to explain", is a loan from Tahitian ha‘a aura‘a "to explain", and so would not be expected in a pre-contact text.

In de Laat's textual analysis, all three deciphered tablets are dialogues without explicit notation of who speaks where. For example, from Ev3,
Surely (I do) not (do) these things? We dispute that!; (your) indignation disgusts (us), Taea! Surely (you) are not going to do that? (Yes), we are going to do that! (Then) you are crazy!

It would be remarkable for these rare pieces of wood to record such exchanges verbatim. Yet the ligature , which de Laat identified as a man named Taea, is found in six of the surviving texts, fully half of the corpus that is indisputably authentic and in good condition, presenting this figure, who is supposed to have murdered his wife, as one of the most important protagonists in the Rapa Nui tradition. Yet there is no such Taea in the surviving Rapa Nui oral literature. This ligature for Taea is the one that was identified by Harrison as a marker for dividing lists, and found by Barthel to have parallels on yet other texts in the forms 380.1.3 and 1.3. However, despite the parallel content of these texts, de Laat's translations of them are quite divergent, because his purely phonetic reading does not allow him to read 1.3 as "Taea". The participants in the dialogues must therefore be different, and de Laat's segmentation of the texts is "unstable".

In response to such criticism, de Laat has begun to "substantially revise" his translations.

External links

  • The Rongorongo of Easter Island. Provides primary sources: Eyraud, Pinart
    Alphonse Pinart
    Alphonse Pinart was a French explorer, philologist, and ethnographer. He was an early champion of the theory that the Americas were first populated by migration across the Bering Strait. To support his research, he made extensive travel in the Pacific, from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to...

    , 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
    Stéphen Chauvet
    Stéphen-Charles Chauvet , more commonly known as Dr Stéphen Chauvet, was the author of the first illustrated compendium of information about Easter Island, L'Île de Pâques et ses mystères, published in Paris in 1935....

     (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.
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