The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
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The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
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Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#2Do we know if it is actually a script encoding a language? I'm an amateur but the first things that pop into my mind are: Can we tell statistically if it looks like it's encoding a language? And could each character represent as much as a complete word or even more than one word (like a line in a song, or an event in a narrative)
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#3Do we know if it is actually a script encoding a language? I'm an amateur but the first things that pop into my mind are: Can we tell statistically if it looks like it's encoding a language? And could each character represent as much as a complete word or even more than one word (like a line in a song, or an event in a narrative)
Perhaps they're barking (sic) up the wrong tree.
The every-other-line-is-180 degrees thing could be explained by two people (such as a parent and child, a couple, or two chiefs or priests) sitting facing one another and working on the workpiece together. It could therefore have ritual semantics rather than merely literary. A test might be to look for alternative micro-stylistic signatures on alternate lines which could suggest dual authors.
The quote "According to oral tradition, knowledge of rongorongo was restricted to a class of priests known as tangata rongorongo" might support this thesis.
LibGen's latest paper on the subject dates from 2020 and summarizes: "among the many published proposals, the only one for which there is more than a modicum of scholarly agreement is the 'Lunar Calendar' on tablet 'Mamari' (Barthel 1958; cf. Guy 1990)."
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#4Do we know if it is actually a script encoding a language? I'm an amateur but the first things that pop into my mind are: Can we tell statistically if it looks like it's encoding a language? And could each character represent as much as a complete word or even more than one word (like a line in a song, or an event in a narrative)
Perhaps they're barking (sic) up the wrong tree. The every-other-line-is-180 degrees thing could be explained by two people (such as a parent and child, a couple, or two chiefs or priests) sitting facing one another and working on the workpiece together. It could therefore have ritual semantics rather than merely literary. A test might be to look for alternative micro-stylistic signatures on alternate lines which cou…
I'm sure linguists are smart enough to recognize handwriting by two different people.
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#5There was a long-held idea that rongorongo was an extreme outlier of Indus Script, itself undeciphered, but a distant ancestor to the Dravidian languages. That notion has been pretty thoroughly trashed, and it's honestly pretty surprising that it's got any life in it because if you even just casually look at the source materials, the likenesses are extremely few and far between.
Steve Fisher - the "decoder" of the Phaistos Disc - also claimed to decode the script, but, eh, well. Maybe? Fisher's whole schtick is to break things into metaphorical levels that make the notion of "coding" sort of nonsensical. He's a neat guy, and maybe I'm just too much of a computationalist to see this form of decoding as anything more rigorous than, say, folklore. And a lot of the patterns Fisher said he found don't hold up.
For my two cents, I think these are related to polynesian petroglyphs (see also the Waianae petroglyphs on Oahu) but employed in a new manner, one that the rapanui were exposed to either with mesoamerican admixture or with the arrival of the Spanish. So they took these glyphs with ritual meaning, but they saw this new way of employing glyphs adjacent in space to derive new meanings, and then they combined their glyphs with this new "writing" method. Doesn't much help with deciphering, I guess, but it does explain where the symbology might come from. Also, the notion of a Polynesian syllabary is just ridiculously fascinating. Every civilization has, like, one thing they're just amazing at, and the Polynesians knew how to boat.
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#6If we can't decode this, how do we think we can interpret alien writing?
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#7If we can't decode this, how do we think we can interpret alien writing?
Interaction and a larger corpus would be invaluable differences to help counter the balance, assuming they have any interest in communicating with us in the first place.
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#8Do we know if it is actually a script encoding a language? I'm an amateur but the first things that pop into my mind are: Can we tell statistically if it looks like it's encoding a language? And could each character represent as much as a complete word or even more than one word (like a line in a song, or an event in a narrative)
Perhaps they're barking (sic) up the wrong tree. The every-other-line-is-180 degrees thing could be explained by two people (such as a parent and child, a couple, or two chiefs or priests) sitting facing one another and working on the workpiece together. It could therefore have ritual semantics rather than merely literary. A test might be to look for alternative micro-stylistic signatures on alternate lines which cou…
When I read
> These are arranged in horizontal lines, but every other line is written upside-down, a style known as reverse boustrophedon. This means that anyone reading the texts would have had to turn them through 180 degrees at the end of each line.
I thought that "turning 180° at the end of each line" was not the most likely explanation, but rather that it was meant to be read by two people standing face to face, in a kind of dialogue or maybe echo/repetition. If that's correct it would be a stage script or used of some kind of ritual. (But it doesn't need to have different authors or scriptors; the same writer could carve each line one after the other.)
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps they're barking (sic) up the wrong tree. The every-other-line-is-180 degrees thing could be explained by two people (such as a parent and child, a couple, or two chiefs or priests) sitting facing one another and working on the workpiece together. It could therefore have ritual semantics rather than merely literary. A test might be to look for alternative micro-stylistic signatures on alternate lines which cou…
When I read > These are arranged in horizontal lines, but every other line is written upside-down, a style known as reverse boustrophedon. This means that anyone reading the texts would have had to turn them through 180 degrees at the end of each line. I thought that "turning 180° at the end of each line" was not the most likely explanation, but rather that it was meant to be read by two people standing face to face,…
Quite a few known ancient scripts, including sometimes Greek, were written and read boustrophedonically, i.e. the following line starts below the end of the previous line. This appears to be the case with Rongorongo and it's reasonable to assume the same is true for it. Of course, we can't be sure because, unlike Greek, we can't read it.
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I read > These are arranged in horizontal lines, but every other line is written upside-down, a style known as reverse boustrophedon. This means that anyone reading the texts would have had to turn them through 180 degrees at the end of each line. I thought that "turning 180° at the end of each line" was not the most likely explanation, but rather that it was meant to be read by two people standing face to face,…
Quite a few known ancient scripts, including sometimes Greek, were written and read boustrophedonically, i.e. the following line starts below the end of the previous line. This appears to be the case with Rongorongo and it's reasonable to assume the same is true for it. Of course, we can't be sure because, unlike Greek, we can't read it.
Yes ancient Greek was mirrored (boustrophedon). This is rotated (reverse boustrophedon)