[HN Gopher] The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
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The Lost Script of Rapa Nui
Author : drdee
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-08-18 03:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| 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 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_.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Witzel held the hypothesis at one point that it
| (IVC language) was a para-Munda language
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| 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 :)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > 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?
| [deleted]
| err4nt wrote:
| Do 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)
| contingencies wrote:
| 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)."
| bambax wrote:
| 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 180deg 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.)
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes ancient Greek was mirrored (boustrophedon). This is
| rotated (reverse boustrophedon)
| Evidlo wrote:
| I'm sure linguists are smart enough to recognize handwriting
| by two different people.
| beardyw wrote:
| 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.
| jheriko wrote:
| frequency analysis is probably a natural first step here.
| [deleted]
| acheron wrote:
| If you're interested in this kind of thing, I recommend the book
| _Lost Languages_ by Andrew Robinson.
| jheriko wrote:
| 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 :)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| All of the language is meticulously described on scholarly
| pieces (see https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2
| C5&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.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| https://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.
| maqqerone wrote:
| Amazing, thanks for sharing
| pseingatl wrote:
| If we can't decode this, how do we think we can interpret alien
| writing?
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
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