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The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
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Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#12https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Glyphs
Many of the glyphs are remarkably similar to petroglyphs found around the world. See Peratt's work:
part 1: https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003...
part 2: https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/Peratt,et,al,TPSv...
more papers: https://plasmauniverse.info/NearEarth.html
Perhaps the ultimate origin of the script is another example (assuming Peratt's hypothesis is correct) of humans witnessing a dramatic light show in the sky and "recording" the evolving shapes of the plasmoids using the resources available to them (rocks, wood, etc).
Much later, when the light show was no longer in living memory, the drawings were copied and perhaps reinterpreted by descendants into a language/story:
According to oral tradition, knowledge of rongorongo was restricted to a class of priests known as tangata rongorongo; and there is some indication that, before Eyraud’s visit, they had been kept in special houses, where clans gathered to hear them read or recited.Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#13https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Glyphs Many of the glyphs are remarkably similar to petroglyphs found around the world. See Peratt's work: part 1: https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003... part 2: https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/Peratt,et,al,TPSv... more papers: https://plasmauniverse.info/NearEarth.html Perhaps the ultimate origin of the script is another example (assuming P…
Amazing, thanks for sharing
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#14If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I recommend the book Lost Languages by Andrew Robinson.
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#15Do 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…
To me it seems entirely natural. If you had a continuous line of text on something pliable you could either loop it back and forth, or chop it up and put the pieces in a pile. Whilst we do the latter, to do the former is perfectly understandable.
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#16> Although James Cook and Jean-Francois de Galaup both made a careful study of the inhabitants and their homes, their accounts said nothing about any written texts. It was not until December 1864 that anyone seems to have noticed it; and by then, it seemed to be everywhere.
Do they consider that it's possibly (keith haring style) art that caught on and was widely imitated after the Rapa Nui people saw the Europeans' written languages?
Might linguists be accidentally trying to decipher what's possibly not written language at all?
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#17> Although James Cook and Jean-Francois de Galaup both made a careful study of the inhabitants and their homes, their accounts said nothing about any written texts. It was not until December 1864 that anyone seems to have noticed it; and by then, it seemed to be everywhere. Do they consider that it's possibly (keith haring style) art that caught on and was widely imitated after the Rapa Nui people saw the Europeans'…
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Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#18There 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 Ph…
I’m pretty sure Witzel held the hypothesis at one point that it (IVC language) was a para-Munda language
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#19this kind of stuff makes we wish we had well organised data, grammars, categorised training sets for image classifiers, and other software accessible data to work on these problems.
academia fails somewhat here, as does industry... and amateurs. not sure who does well lol... but im sure we can do better :)
Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
#20Do 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)
frequency analysis is probably a natural first step here.