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The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

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Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#21

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jheriko wrote: post #19

this 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 :)

All of the language is meticulously described on scholarly pieces (see https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=rong...), what is it exactly you seem to be looking for?

It's not a matter of data not being available, it's a matter of people not putting the work in. A bit like open source.

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#22

Post by MilStdJunkie »

selimthegrim wrote: post #18
MilStdJunkie wrote: post #5

There 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

That's super interesting. I need to really delve into that. There's a lot of human weltenwandel movements around the Indian Ocean that almost beggar belief - Madagascar's colonization, the nutty early crossing to Australia, whatever the hell was going on between SE Asia and the Americas. Makes me wish I was an academic instead of, well, a milstdjunkie :)

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#23

Post by selimthegrim »

MilStdJunkie wrote: post #22
selimthegrim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure Witzel held the hypothesis at one point that it (IVC language) was a para-Munda language

That's super interesting. I need to really delve into that. There's a lot of human weltenwandel movements around the Indian Ocean that almost beggar belief - Madagascar's colonization, the nutty early crossing to Australia, whatever the hell was going on between SE Asia and the Americas. Makes me wish I was an academic instead of, well, a milstdjunkie :)

Prepare to have your mind blown, especially the part about country of origin - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_metel#Entheogen

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#24

Post by lnxg33k1 »

To me it's awesome that there is no correction in the table, like they had truly permanent markers, but I can only see one spot where it seem to be something that resembles a correction, but yeah quite awesome that they never mistyped anything

Or at least never thought like "Maybe this phrase I can write it using 3 vertical fishes instead of 5" or something like that

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#25

Post by buescher »

Ok, not a linguist, and probably couldn't hang with a bright undergrad in the subject, but I'm going to make a HN-inventing-things-from-first-principles conjecture: could there be a class of early scripts that are more a mnemonic device than a true writing system as we would undertand it today? I.e. without already knowing an enormous amount of context, no one could understand them? Is there a term for such a thing?

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#26

Post by hakfoo »

buescher wrote: post #25

Ok, not a linguist, and probably couldn't hang with a bright undergrad in the subject, but I'm going to make a HN-inventing-things-from-first-principles conjecture: could there be a class of early scripts that are more a mnemonic device than a true writing system as we would undertand it today? I.e. without already knowing an enormous amount of context, no one could understand them? Is there a term for such a thing?

Shorthand scripts, as used by stenographers tome to mind; while there are common conventions I understand that many of them were extended by individual users to the point of being unreadable to anyone else.

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#28

Post by bradrn »

buescher wrote: post #25

Ok, not a linguist, and probably couldn't hang with a bright undergrad in the subject, but I'm going to make a HN-inventing-things-from-first-principles conjecture: could there be a class of early scripts that are more a mnemonic device than a true writing system as we would undertand it today? I.e. without already knowing an enormous amount of context, no one could understand them? Is there a term for such a thing?

Absolutely this is possible! Such systems are called ‘proto-writing’ [0], and formed the precursor to almost every writing system known today (with the exception of ones such as Hangeul and Cherokee, which were basically created from scratch).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-writing

Re: The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

#29

Post by karencarits »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #24

To me it's awesome that there is no correction in the table, like they had truly permanent markers, but I can only see one spot where it seem to be something that resembles a correction, but yeah quite awesome that they never mistyped anything Or at least never thought like "Maybe this phrase I can write it using 3 vertical fishes instead of 5" or something like that

According to Wikipedia,they may have drafted on banana leaves and also used lighter instruments to draft on the wood itself before deeper engraving with shark teeth or similar
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