The Lost Script of Rapa Nui | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Script of Rapa Nui

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52 pointsdrdee27 comments

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)

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)."

I'm sure linguists are smart enough to recognize handwriting by two different people.

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.)

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)

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.

frequency analysis is probably a natural first step here.

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.

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

The script appears likely to have been developed post European landfall. As such, it could be a kind of cargo-culting of books. Inversion of the wooden panel mimics turning a page.

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.

Amazing, thanks for sharing

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I recommend the book Lost Languages by Andrew Robinson.

thank you! just ordered it :) I would recommend "gods, graves and scholars" from my side. Any others?

If 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.

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.

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

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

> 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?

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.

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