Rongorongo
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- For Rongorongo, an ancestress of some New Zealand Māori tribes, see Rongorongo (wife of Turi)
Rongorongo or rongo-rongo ("recitation" in the Rapa Nui language) is one of three scripts of Easter Island, the others being the ta'u and mama scripts. Only 26 rongorongo texts remain, along with 6 ta'u and 2 mama texts. All three scripts are carved onto wooden boards, and are read in reverse boustrophedon fashion (bottom to top). Other than one tablet, which has been shown to be a lunar calendar, these remain undeciphered. As with most undeciphered scripts, there are all manner of fanciful interpretations and claimed translations of the rongo-rongo texts. It has also been suggested that rongo-rongo is not a writing system proper but a genealogy, a mnemonic device, a choreography, and as sidereal navigation information (by Michael Dietrich).
In 1862, Peruvian slave ships captured nearly the entire population of Easter Island. The remaining population does not seem to have been literate, and knowledge of how to read the scripts was lost.
In 1866 a Catholic bishop in Tahiti, Florentin Jaussen, worked with Metoro Taouaouré to create a list of rongo-rongo signs and translations. However, the 'translations' have been no help in deciphering rongo-rongo, and many suspect that Taouaouré did not actually know the script. In 1949, Boris Kudrjavtsev noticed a repeated sequence in two tablets, which has since been found in others. Thomas Barthel published line drawings of the entire corpus in 1958, and showed that one of the tablets is a lunar calendar. By 1971 he had reduced the inventory of signs to 120. Later the signs for 'moon', 'lizard', and the god Tane were identified, and fused glyphs were recognized. Steven Fischer published the corpus again in 1993. He suggests that the islanders developed the script after encountering writing when a Spanish ship called at Easter Island in 1770. Online, rongorongo.org has become a central source for information about the script, including the primary sources describing it and complete transcriptions of its texts. Its anonymous author is skeptical about attempts to decipher the script but recognizes the key advances towards understanding it.
Martha Macri of the University of California at Davis, who has also worked on the Mayan script, suggests that the majority of the glyphs are in fact fused compounds of a limited set of basic signs. The number of these signs, which she numbers at less than 70, suggests that Rongo-rongo may be a syllabary augmented by perhaps a dozen logograms, as 55 would be required for a pure syllabary of ten consonants and five vowels (10×5 consonant-vowel syllables plus 5 vowel-only syllables). The suspected logograms, such as the lunar crescent and the lizard mentioned above, don't form compounds. Many of the basic signs appear to be cognate with petroglyphs found around the island. The number of signs fused together (1 to 4 or 5, averaging about 2) suggests that each of the larger units might represent a word. Indeed, this "is consistent with the assertion of islanders that each graphic unit represents a single word". If the script is indeed a syllabary, and especially if it's divided into words in the European fashion, this would support Fischer's suggestion that the idea for writing came from European explorers through contact diffusion. [When people are exposed to the idea of phonetic writing, without understanding the alphabetic system, and then set out to create scripts of their own, they usually create syllabaries. E.g., Cherokee of the US, Vai of Liberia, Afaka of Suriname. However, the few cases we have of scripts created ex nihilo in ancient times (Sumerian/Egyptian/Elamite, Shang/Chinese, Olmec/Mayan) are logogram-based systems.]
External links
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