which even Fedorova characterized as "worthy of a maniac".^[39]

Moreover, the allographs detected by Pozdniakov are given different readings by Fedorova, so that, for example, otherwise parallel texts repeatedly substitute the purported verb {{nowrap| ma‘u}} "take" for the purported noun {{nowrap| tonga}} "a kind of yam". (Pozdniakov has demonstrated that these are graphic variants of the same glyph.) As it was, Fedorova's catalog consisted of only 130 glyphs; Pozdniakov's additional allography would have reduced that number and made her interpretation even more repetitive. Such extreme repetition is a problem with all attempts to read rongorongo as a logographic script.^[40]

Many recent scholars^[41] are of the opinion that, while many researchers have made modest incremental contributions to the understanding of rongorongo, notably Kudrjavtsev et al., Butinov and Knorozov, and Thomas Barthel, the attempts at actual decipherment, such as those of Fedorova here or of Fischer below, "are not accompanied by the least justification".{{refn|[I]ls ne sont pas accompagnés de la moindre justification.^[42]|group="note"}} All fail the key test of decipherment: a meaningful application to novel texts and patterns.

Harrison

James Park Harrison, a council member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, noticed that lines Gr3–7 of the Small Santiago tablet featured a compound glyph, {{nowrap|380.1.3 }} (a sitting figure {{nowrap|380 }} holding a rod {{nowrap|1 }} with a line of chevrons (a garland?) {{nowrap|3 ),}} repeated 31 times, each time followed by one to half a dozen glyphs before its next occurrence. He believed that this broke the text into sections containing the names of chiefs.^[43] Barthel later found this pattern on tablet K, which is a paraphrase of Gr (in many of the K sequences the compound is reduced to {{nowrap|380.1 ),}} as well as on A, where it sometimes appears as 380.1.3 and sometimes as 380.1; on C, E, and S as 380.1; and, with the variant {{nowrap|380.1.52 ,}} on N. In places it appears abbreviated as {{nowrap|1.3 }} or {{nowrap|1.52 ,}} without the human figure, but parallels in the texts suggest these have the same separating function.^[44] Barthel saw the sequence {{nowrap|380.1 }} as a tangata rongorongo (rongorongo expert) holding an inscribed staff like the Santiago Staff.

{{anchor|Kudrjavtsev}} Kudrjavtsev et al.

During World War II, a small group of students in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), Boris Kudrjavtsev, Valeri Chernushkov, and Oleg Klitin, became interested in tablets P, and Q, which they saw on display at the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology. They discovered that they bore, with minor variation, the same text, which they later found on tablet H as well:

Parallel texts: A short excerpt of tablets H, P, and Q

Barthel would later call this the "Grand Tradition", though its contents remain unknown.

The group later noticed that tablet K was a close paraphrase of the recto of G. Kudrjavtsev wrote up their findings, which were published posthumously.^[45] Numerous other parallel, though shorter, sequences have since been identified through statistical analysis, with texts N and R found to be composed almost entirely of phrases shared with other tablets, though not in the same order.^[46]

Identifying such shared phrasing was one of the first steps in unraveling the structure of the script, as it is the best way to detect ligatures and allographs, and thus to establish the inventory of rongorongo glyphs.

Ligatures: Parallel texts Pr4–5 (top) and Hr5 (bottom) show that a figure (glyph {{nowrap|1=200 )}} holding an object {{nowrap|1=(glyphs 8 ,}} {{nowrap|1=1 ,}} and {{nowrap|1=9 )}} in P may be fused into a ligature in H, where the object replaces either the figure's head or its hand. (Elsewhere in these texts, animal figures are reduced to a distinctive feature such as a head or arm when they fuse with a preceding glyph.) Here also are the two hand shapes (glyphs {{nowrap|1=6 }} and {{nowrap|1=64 )}} which would later be established as allographs. Three of the four human and turtle figures at left have arm ligatures with an orb (glyph {{nowrap|1=62 ),}} which Pozdniakov found often marks a phrase boundary.

Butinov and Knorozov {{anchor|Butinov and Knorozov}}

In 1957 the Russian epigraphers Nikolai Butinov and Yuri Knorozov (who in 1952 had provided the key insights which would later lead to the decipherment of the Maya writing system) suggested that the repetitive structure of a sequence of some fifteen glyphs on Gv5–6 (lines 5 and 6 of the verso of the Small Santiago Tablet) was compatible with a genealogy. It reads in part,

Now, if the repeated independent glyph {{nowrap|1=200 }} is a title, such as "king", and if the repeated attached glyph {{nowrap|1=76 }} is a patronymic marker, then this means something like:

King A, B's son, King B, C's son, King C, D's son, King D, E's son,

and the sequence is a lineage.

Although no-one has been able to confirm Butinov and Knorozov's hypothesis, it is widely considered plausible.^[47] If it is correct, then, first, we can identify other glyph sequences which constitute personal names. Second, the Santiago Staff would consist mostly of persons' names as it bears 564 occurrences of glyph 76, the putative patronymic marker, one fourth of the total of 2320 glyphs. Third, the sequence 606.76 700, translated by Fischer (below) as "all the birds copulated with the fish", would in reality mean (So-and-so) son of 606 was killed. The Santiago Staff, with 63 occurrences of glyph {{nowrap|700 ,}} a rebus for îka "victim", would then be in part a kohau îka (list of war casualties).^[48]

Barthel

German ethnologist Thomas Barthel, who first published the rongorongo corpus, identified three lines on the recto (side a) of tablet C, also known as Mamari, as a lunar calendar.^[49] Guy proposed that it was more precisely an astronomical rule for whether one or two intercalary nights should be inserted into the 28-night Rapanui month to keep it in sync with the phases of the moon, and if one night, whether this should come before or after the full moon.^[50] Berthin and Berthin propose that it is the text which follows the identified calendar which shows where the intercalary nights should appear.^[51] The Mamari calendar is the only example of rongorongo whose function is currently accepted as being understood, though it cannot actually be read.

In Guy's interpretation, the core of the calendar is a series of 29 left-side crescents ("☾", colored red on the photo of the table at right) on either side of the full moon, {{nowrap|,}} a pictogram of te nuahine kā ‘umu ‘a rangi kotekote 'the old woman lighting an earth oven in the kotekote sky'—the Man in the Moon of Oceanic mythology. These correspond to the 28 basic and two intercalary nights of the old Rapa Nui lunar calendar.

These thirty nights, starting with the new moon, are divided into eight groups by a "heralding sequence" of four glyphs (above, and colored purple on the tablet at right) which ends in the pictogram of a fish on a line (yellow). The heralding sequences each contain two right-side lunar crescents ("☽"). In all four heralding sequences preceding the full moon the fish is head up; in all four following it the fish is head down, suggesting the waxing and waning of the moon. The way the crescents are grouped together reflects the patterns of names in the old calendar. The two ☾ crescents at the end of the calendar, introduced with an expanded heralding sequence, represent the two intercalary nights held in reserve. The eleventh crescent, with the bulge, is where one of those nights is found in Thomson's and Métraux's records.

Guy notes that the further the Moon is from the Earth in its eccentric orbit, the slower it moves, and the more likely the need to resort to an intercalary night to keep the calendar in sync with its phases. He hypothesizes that the "heralding sequences" are instructions to observe the apparent diameter of the Moon, and that the half-size superscripted crescents (orange) preceding the sixth night before and sixth night after the full moon represent the small apparent diameter at apogee which triggers intercalation. (The first small crescent corresponds to the position of hotu in Thomson and Métraux.)

Seven of the calendrical crescents (red) are accompanied by other glyphs (green). Guy suggests syllabic readings for some of these, based on possible rebuses and correspondences with the names of the nights in the old calendar.{{refn|For a glyph-by-glyph analysis as of 1998, including proposed rebuses and phonetic readings, see Guy's The Lunar Calendar of Tablet Mamari.^[52]|group="note"}} The two sequences of six and five nights without such accompanying glyphs (beginning of line 7, and transition of lines 7–8) correspond to the two groups of six and five numbered kokore nights, which do not have individual names.

Fischer

In 1995 independent linguist Steven Fischer, who also claims to have deciphered the enigmatic Phaistos Disc, announced that he had cracked the rongorongo "code", making him the only person in history to have deciphered two such scripts.^[53] In the decade since, this has not been accepted by other researchers, who feel that Fischer overstated the single pattern which formed the basis of his decipherment, and note that it has not led to an understanding of other patterns.^[54]

Decipherment

Fischer notes that the long text of the 125-cm Santiago Staff is unlike other texts in that it appears to have punctuation: The 2,320-glyph text is divided by "103 vertical lines at odd intervals" which do not occur on any of the tablets. Fischer remarked that glyph {{nowrap|76 ,}} identified as a possible patronymic marker by Butinov and Knorozov, is attached to the first glyph in each section of text, and that "almost all" sections contain a multiple of three glyphs, with the first bearing a 76 "suffix".{{#tag:ref|See, for example, figure 2 of Fischer's on-line article,^[55] at the start of line I5 (Fischer's line 8), where vertical bars delineate some of these X-Y-Z triplets. The pattern can be summarized as:

| X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z A A | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z X.76(?) Y Z X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z X.76 Y Z Z | X.76 Y Z | X.76 Y |,

However, the text continues with

| X.76 76 Z.76 A B X.76 76 Z.76 |, etc.

which breaks the pattern both in terms of triplets and in the placement of the 'phalluses'. This is not visible in Fischer's truncated figure 2, but can be seen in the complete text.|group="note"|name="fig2"}}

Fischer identified glyph 76 as a phallus and the text of the Santiago Staff as a creation chant consisting of hundreds of repetitions of X–phallus Y Z, which he interpreted as X copulated with Y, there issued forth Z. His primary example was this one:

about half-way through line 12 of the Santiago Staff. Fischer interpreted glyph 606 as "bird"+"hand", with the phallus attached as usual at its lower right; glyph 700 as "fish"; and glyph 8 as "sun".{{refn|In the Jaussen list, 600 (606 without the hand) is identified as a frigatebird or as a bird flying (p 4), 700 as a fish (p 4), and 8 variously as the sun, a star, or fire (pp 2–3). 76 is not identified.^[56]|group="note"}}

On the basis that the Rapanui word ma‘u "to take" is nearly homophonous with a plural marker mau, he posited that the hand of 606 was that plural marker, via a semantic shift of "hand" → "take", and thus translated 606 as "all the birds". Taking penis to mean "copulate", he read the sequence 606.76 700 8 as "all the birds copulated, fish, sun".

Fischer supported his interpretation by claiming similarities to the recitation Atua Matariri, so called from its first words, which was collected by William Thomson. This recitation is a litany where each verse has the form X, ki ‘ai ki roto ki Y, ka pû te Z, literally "X having been inside Y the Z comes forward". Here is the first verse, according to Salmon and then according to Métraux (neither of whom wrote glottal stops or long vowels):

"God Atua Matariri and goddess Taporo produced thistle."|Salmon}}

"God-of-the-angry-look by copulating with Roundness (?) produced the poporo (black nightshade, Solanum nigrum)."|Métraux}}

Fischer proposed that the glyph sequence 606.76 700 8, literally MANU:MA‘U.‘AI ÎKA RA‘Â "bird:hand.penis fish sun", had the analogous phonetic reading of:

"All the birds copulated with the fish; there issued forth the sun."}}

He claimed similar phallic triplets for several other texts. However, in the majority of texts glyph 76 is not common, and Fischer proposed that these were a later, more developed stage of the script, where the creation chants had been abbreviated to X Y Z and omit the phallus. He concluded that 85% of the rongorongo corpus consisted of such creation chants, and that it was only a matter of time before rongorongo would be fully deciphered.^[57]

Objections

There are a number of objections to Fischer's approach:

• When Andrew Robinson checked the claimed pattern, he found that "Close inspection of the Santiago Staff reveals that only 63 out of the 113 [sic] sequences on the staff fully obey the triad structure (and 63 is the maximum figure, giving every Fischer attribution the benefit of the doubt)."^[58] Glyph {{nowrap|76 }} occurs sometimes in isolation, sometimes compounded with itself, and sometimes in the 'wrong' part (or even all parts) of the triplets. Other than on the Staff, Pozdniakov could find Fischer's triplets only in the poorly preserved text of Ta and in the single line of Gv which Butinov and Knorozov suggested might be a genealogy.^[59]
• Pozdniakov and Pozdniakov calculated that altogether the four glyphs of Fischer's primary example make up 20% of the corpus. "Hence it is easy to find examples in which, on the contrary, 'the sun copulates with the fish', and sometimes also with the birds. Fischer does not mention the resulting chaos in which everything is copulating in all manner of unlikely combinations. Furthermore, it is by no means obvious in what sense this 'breakthrough' is 'phonetic'."^[40]
• The plural marker mau does not exist in Rapanui, but is instead an element of Tahitian grammar. However, even if it did occur in Rapanui, Polynesian mau is only a plural marker when it precedes a noun; after a noun it is an adjective which means "true, genuine, proper".^[48]
• No Polynesian myth tells of birds copulating with fish to produce the sun. Fischer justifies his interpretation thus: This is very close to [verse] number 25 from Daniel Ure Va‘e Iko's procreation chant [Atua Matariri] "Land copulated with the fish Ruhi Paralyzer: There issued forth the sun."^[60] However, this claim depends on Salmon's English translation, which does not follow from his Rapanui transcription of

Heima; Ki ai Kiroto Kairui Kairui-Hakamarui Kapu te Raa.^[48]

Métraux gives the following interpretation of that verse:

He Hina [He ima?] ki ai ki roto kia Rui-haka-ma-rui, ka pu te raa.

"Moon (?) by copulating with Darkness (?) produced Sun",^[61]

which mentions neither birds nor fish.

• Given Fischer's reading, Butinov and Knorozov's putative genealogy on tablet Gv becomes semantically odd, with several animate beings copulating with the same human figure to produce themselves:^[48]

[turtle] copulated with {{nowrap|}} [man], there issued forth [turtle]

[shark?] copulated with {{nowrap|}} [man] there issued forth [shark]

etc.{{refn|

Fischer was familiar with Butinov and Knorozov's article, and describes their contribution as "a milestone in rongorongo studies". Yet he dismisses their hypothesis thus: "Unfortunately, [Butinov's] proof for this claim consisted again, as in 1956, of the "genealogy" which Butinov believed is inscribed on the verso of the "Small Santiago Tablet" [tablet Gv]. In actual fact, this text appears instead to be a procreation chant whose X¹YZ structure radically differs from what Butinov has segmented for this text."^[62]|group="note"}}

• Cryptologist Tomi Melka deduced that Fischer's hypothesis cannot be true for the entire Staff, let alone other texts.^[63]
• Computational linguist Richard Sproat could not replicate the parallels Fischer claimed between the Santiago Staff and the other texts. He automated the search for string matches between the texts and found that the staff stood alone:

Pozdniakov

In the 1950s, Butinov and Knorozov had performed a statistical analysis of several rongorongo texts and had concluded that either the language of the texts was not Polynesian, or that it was written in a condensed telegraphic style, because it contained no glyphs comparable in frequency to Polynesian grammatical particles such as the Rapanui articles te and he or the preposition ki. These findings have since been used to argue that rongorongo is not a writing system at all, but mnemonic proto-writing. However, Butinov and Knorozov had used Barthel's preliminary encoding, which Konstantin Pozdniakov, senior researcher at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg (until 1996), noted was inappropriate for statistical analysis. The problem, as Butinov and Knorozov, and Barthel himself, had admitted, was that in many cases distinct numerical codes had been assigned to ligatures and allographs, as if these were independent glyphs. The result was that while Barthel's numerical transcription of a text enabled a basic discussion of its contents for the first time, it failed to capture its linguistic structure and actually interfered with inter-text comparison.^[64]

In 2011, Pozdniakov released a pre-press publication analyzing Text E Keiti, including a glyph-by-glyph comparison of the transcription in Barthel (1958), with misidentified glyphs corrected per Horley (2010).^[65]

Revising the glyph inventory

To resolve this deficiency, Pozdniakov (1996) reanalyzed thirteen of the better preserved texts, attempting to identify all ligatures and allographs in order to better approach a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and their numeric representation. He observed that all these texts but I and G verso consist predominantly of shared phrases (sequences of glyphs), which occur in different orders and contexts on different tablets.{{refn|Pozdniakov did not tabulate the short texts J, L, X; the fragments F, W, Y; the mostly obliterated texts M, O, T–V, Z; nor tablet D, though he did identify some sequences shared with Y and discussed possible reading orders of D. However, he notes that T shares short sequences with I and Gv rather than with the other texts.^[59]|group="note"}} By 2007 he had identified some one hundred shared phrases, each between ten and one hundred glyphs long. Even setting aside the completely parallel texts Gr–K and the 'Grand Tradition' of H–P–Q, he found that half of the remainder comprises such phrases:

Phrasing: Variants of this twenty-glyph phrase, all missing some of these glyphs or adding others, are found twelve times, in eight of the thirteen texts Pozdniakov tabulated: lines Ab4, Cr2–3, Cv2, Cv12, Ev3, Ev6, Gr2–3, Hv12, Kr3, Ra6, Rb6, and Sa1. Among other things, such phrases have established or confirmed the reading order of some of the tablets.^[66]

These shared sequences begin and end with a notably restricted set of glyphs.^[67] For example, many begin or end, or both, with glyph 62 (an arm ending in a circle: {{nowrap|)}} or with a ligature where glyph 62 replaces the arm or wing of a figure (see the ligature image under Kudrjavtsev et al.).

Contrasting these phrases allowed Pozdniakov to determine that some glyphs occur in apparent free variation both in isolation and as components of ligatures. Thus he proposed that the two hand shapes, {{nowrap|6 }} (three fingers and a thumb) and {{nowrap|64 }} (a four-fingered forked hand), are graphic variants of a single glyph, which also attaches to or replaces the arms of various other glyphs:^[68]

Allographs: The 'hand' allographs (left), plus some of the fifty pairs of allographic 'hand' ligatures to which Barthel had assigned distinct character codes.

The fact the two hands appear to substitute for each other in all these pairs of glyphs when the repeated phrases are compared lends credence to their identity. Similarly, Pozdniakov proposed that the heads with "gaping mouths", as in glyph {{nowrap|380 ,}} are variants of the bird heads, so that the entirety of Barthel's 300 and 400 series of glyphs are seen as either ligatures or variants of the 600 series.^[69]

Despite finding that some of the forms Barthel had assumed were allographs appeared instead to be independent glyphs, such as the two orientations of his glyph 27, {{nowrap|,}} the overall conflation of allographs and ligatures greatly reduced the size of Barthel's published 600-glyph inventory. By recoding the texts with these findings and then recomparing them, Pozdniakov was able to detect twice as many shared phrases, which enabled him to further consolidate the inventory of glyphs. By 2007, he and his father, a pioneer in Russian computer science, had concluded that 52 glyphs accounted for 99.7% of the corpus.^[70]{{refn|The other 0.3% were made up of two dozen glyphs with limited distribution, many of them hapax legomena. This analysis excluded the Santiago Staff, which contained another three or four frequent glyphs.|group="note"}} From this he deduced that rongorongo is essentially a syllabary, though mixed with non-syllabic elements, possibly determinatives or logographs for common words (see below). The data analysis, however, has not been published.

The shared repetitive nature of the phrasing of the texts, apart from Gv and I, suggests to Pozdniakov that they are not integral texts, and cannot contain the varied contents which would be expected for history or mythology.^[73] In the following table of characters in the Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov inventory, ordered by descending frequency, the first two rows of 26 characters account for 86% of the entire corpus.^[74]

Statistical evidence

With a rigorously derived inventory, Pozdniakov was able to test his ideas about the nature of the script. He tabulated the frequency distributions of glyphs in ten texts (excluding the divergent Santiago Staff) and found that they coincided with the distribution of syllables in ten archaic Rapanui texts such as the Apai recitation, with nearly identical deviations from an ideal Zipfian distribution. He took this as evidence both for rongorongo being essentially syllabic and for its being consistent with the Rapanui language.{{refn|The relative distribution of glyphs depends on the type of script. For example, a logographic script will have a very marked difference in frequency between lexical words and grammatical words such as the ubiquitous Rapanui article te, while a syllabary will have a less skewed distribution, and an alphabet will be even less skewed. However, this could be complicated by rongorongo being written in a condensed telegraphic style, with such grammatical words omitted, perhaps due to a shortage of wood on the island. Pozdniakov also compared the distributions with "several other languages", and found these did not match rongorongo: le calcul des fréquences dans plusieurs autres langues montre des distributions très différentes de celle qui est typique de l'écriture pascuane.^[86]|group="note"}} For example, the most common glyph, 6, and the most common syllable, {{IPA|/a/}}, both make up 10% of their corpora; the syllables te and he, which Butinov and Knorozov found so problematic, could at 5.7% and 3.5% be associated with any number of common rongorongo glyphs. In addition, the numbers of glyphs linked or fused together closely match the numbers of syllables in Rapanui words, both in the texts overall and in their respective lexicons, suggesting that each combination of glyphs represents a word:^[75]

In both corpora there were many more monosyllables/single glyphs in running text than in the lexicon. That is, in both a relatively small number of such forms are very frequent, suggesting that rongorongo is compatible with Rapanui, which has a small number of very frequent monosyllabic grammatical particles. Rongorongo and Rapanui are also almost identical in the proportion of syllables/glyphs found in isolation and in initial, medial, and final position within a word/ligature.^[76]

However, while such statistical tests demonstrate that rongorongo is consistent with a syllabic Rapanui script, syllables are not the only thing which can produce this result. In the Rapanui texts, some two dozen common polysyllabic words, such as ariki 'leader', ingoa 'name', and rua 'two', have the same frequency as a score of syllables, while other syllables such as {{IPA|/tu/}} are less frequent than these words.^[77]

This suspicion that rongorongo may not be fully syllabic is supported by positional patterns within the texts. The distributions of Rapanui syllables within polysyllabic words and of rongorongo glyphs within ligatures are very similar, strengthening the syllabic connection. However, monosyllabic words and isolated glyphs behave very differently; here rongorongo does not look at all syllabic. For example, all glyphs but {{nowrap|901 }} are attested in isolation, whereas only half of the 55 Rapanui syllables occur as monosyllabic words.^[78] Furthermore, among those syllables which do occur in isolation, their rate of doing so is much lower than that of the glyphs: Only three syllables, {{IPA|/te/}}, {{IPA|/he/}}, and {{IPA|/ki/}}, occur more than half the time in isolation (as grammatical particles), whereas a score of glyphs are more commonly found in isolation than not.^[79] Contextual analysis may help explain this: Whereas Rapanui monosyllables are grammatical particles and generally precede polysyllabic nouns and verbs, so that monosyllables rarely occur together, isolated rongorongo glyphs are usually found together, suggesting a very different function. Pozdniakov hypothesizes that the difference may be due to the presence of determinatives, or that glyphs have dual functions, as phonograms in combination but as logograms in isolation, parallel to the Maya script.^[80] On the other hand, no glyph approaches the frequency, when in isolation, of the articles te and he or the preposition ki in running text. It may be that these particles were simply not written, but Pozdniakov suspects that they were written together with the following word, as is the case with prepositions and articles in Classical Latin and written Arabic.^[81]

Further complicating this picture are repetition patterns. There are two types of repetition in Rapanui words: double syllables within roots, as in mamari, and grammatical reduplication of disyllables, as seen in rongorongo. In the Rapanui lexicon, double syllables as in mamari are 50% more likely than chance can explain. However, in the rongorongo texts, analogous double AA glyphs are only 8% more likely than chance.^[82] Similarly, in the Rapanui lexicon reduplicated disyllables such as rongorongo are seven times as common as chance, constituting a quarter of the vocabulary, whereas, in rongorongo texts, ABAB sequences are only twice as likely as chance, and 10% of the vocabulary.^[83] If rongorongo is a phonetic script, therefore, this discrepancy needs to be explained. Pozdniakov suggests that perhaps there was a 'reduplicator' glyph, or that modifications of glyphs, such as facing heads to the left rather than to the right, may have indicated repetition.^[84]

Sound values

The results of statistical analysis will be strongly affected by any errors in identifying the inventory of glyphs, as well as by divergence from a purely syllabic representation, such as a glyph for reduplication.^[81] There are also large differences in the frequencies of individual syllables among the Rapanui texts, which makes any direct identification problematic.^[85] While Pozdniakov has not been able to assign any phonetic values with any certainty, statistical results do place constraints on which values are possible.

One possibility for a logogram of the most common word in Rapanui, the article te, is the most common glyph, {{nowrap|200 ,}} which does not pattern like a phonogram.^[81] Glyph 200 occurs mostly in initial position and is more frequent in running text than any syllable in the Rapanui lexicon, both characteristics of the article. A possibility for a reduplicator glyph is {{nowrap|3 ,}} which is also very common and does not pattern like a phonogram, but occurs predominantly in final position.^[83]

Because a repeated word or phrase, such as the ubiquitous ki ‘ai ki roto in the Atua Matariri recitation, will skew the statistics of that text, phonetic frequencies are best compared using word lists (considering each word individually) rather than the full texts. Pozdniakov used a few basic correlations between Rapanui and rongorongo to help narrow down the possible phonetic values of the glyphs. For instance, the relative frequencies of rongorongo glyphs in initial, medial, and final position in a ligature presumably constrain their possible sound values to syllables with similar distributions within the lexicon. Syllables beginning with ng, for example, are more common at the ends of words than in initial position.^[86] The overall frequencies, and the patterns of doubling and reduplication, on the other hand, seem to associate arm glyphs specifically with vocalic syllables:

• Overall frequency. Syllables without a consonant (vocalic syllables) are more common in Rapanui than syllables beginning with any of the ten consonants. Of the vowels, {{IPA|/a/}} is more than twice as frequent as any of the others. Thus the syllables comprising more than 3% of the Rapanui lexicon are {{IPA|/i/}}, {{IPA|/e/}}, {{IPA|/a/}}, {{IPA|/o/}}, {{IPA|/u/}}; {{IPA|/ta/}}, {{IPA|/ra/}}, {{IPA|/ka/}}, {{IPA|/na/}}, {{IPA|/ma/}}; and {{IPA|/ri/}}. (The three most common, the vocalic syllables {{IPA|/a/}}, {{IPA|/i/}}, {{IPA|/u/}}, comprise a full quarter of the corpus.) The glyphs comprising more than 3% of the rongorongo corpus are, in order, {{nowrap|200 ,}} {{nowrap|6 }} or {{nowrap|,}} {{nowrap|10 ,}} {{nowrap|3 ,}} {{nowrap|62 ,}} {{nowrap|400 ,}} {{nowrap|61 .}} As noted above, 200 and 3 do not pattern as phonograms. Of the remaining five, four are limbs (arms or wings).^[87]
• Reduplication. In grammatical reduplication, vowels are also the most common syllables; so are the glyphs {{nowrap|6 ,}} {{nowrap|10 ,}} {{nowrap|61 ,}} {{nowrap|62 ,}} {{nowrap|901 ,}} all limbs.^[88]
• Doubling. Among doubled syllables, however, vocalic syllables are much less common. Four syllables, {{IPA|/i/}}, {{IPA|/a/}}, {{IPA|/u/}}, {{IPA|/ma/}}, are less commonly doubled than chance would dictate. Three glyphs are less common when doubled than chance as well: {{nowrap|6 ,}} {{nowrap|10 ,}} and {{nowrap|63 ,}} two of them limbs.^[82]

The exceptionally high frequencies of glyph {{nowrap|6 }} and of the syllable {{IPA|/a/}}, everywhere except when doubled, suggest that glyph 6 may have the sound value {{IPA|/a/}}. Pozdniakov proposes with less confidence that the second most extreme glyph, {{nowrap|10 ,}} might have the sound value {{IPA|/i/}}.^[89]

Objections

As Pozdniakov readily admits, his analysis is highly sensitive to the accuracy of the glyph inventory.^[4] Since he has not published the details of how he established this inventory, it is not possible for others to verify his work.

As of 2008, there has been little response to Pozdniakov's approach. However, Sproat (2007) believes that the results from the frequency distributions are nothing more than an effect of Zipf's Law, and furthermore that neither rongorongo nor the old texts were representative of the Rapanui language, so that a comparison between them is unlikely to be enlightening.

Notes

References

Bibliography

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{{ cite book | author = Barthel, Thomas S. | authorlink = Thomas Barthel | year = 1958 | title = Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift (Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script) | location = Hamburg | publisher = Cram, de Gruyter }} {{de icon}}

{{ cite book | author = ———— | year = 1978 | title = The Eighth Land | location = Honolulu | publisher = the University Press of Hawaii }}

{{ cite journal | author = Berthin, Gordon |author2=Michael Berthin | year = 2006 | title = Astronomical Utility and Poetic Metaphor in the Rongorongo Lunar Calendar | url = http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/ASSA-No18/Article7en.html | journal = Applied Semiotics | volume = 8 | issue = 18 | pages = 85–98 }}

{{ cite journal | author = Butinov, Nikolai A. |author2=Yuri Knorozov | year = 1957 | title = Preliminary Report on the Study of the Written Language of Easter Island | journal = Journal of the Polynesian Society | volume = 66 | issue = 1 | pages = 5–17 }}

{{ cite journal | author = Carroll, Alan | year = 1892 | title = The Easter Island inscriptions, and the translation and interpretation of them | journal = Journal of the Polynesian Society | volume = 1 | pages = 103–106, 233–252 }}

{{ cite journal | author = Carter, Jennifer M. T. |date=January 2003 | title = For the Sake of All Women | url = http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2003/jan03/article5.html | journal = NLA News | volume = VIII | issue = 4 }}

{{ cite book | author1 = Comrie, Bernard | authorlink = Bernard Comrie | author2 = Matthews, Stephen | author3 = Polinsky, Maria, eds. | year = 1996 | title = The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages throughout the World | publisher = Quarto Publishing | location = London }}

{{ cite book | author = Englert, Sebastián | authorlink = Sebastian Englert | year = 1970 | title = Island at the center of the world: new light on Easter Island | publisher = Scribner }}

{{ cite book | author = ———— | year = 1993 | title = La tierra de Hotu Matu‘a — Historia y Etnología de la Isla de Pascua, Gramática y Diccionario del antiguo idioma de la isla (The Land of Hotu Matu‘a: History and Ethnology of Easter Island, Grammar and Dictionary of the Old Language of the Island) | edition = 6th | location = Santiago de Chile | publisher = Editorial Universitaria }} {{es icon}}

{{ cite book | author = Fedorova (Fyodorova), Irina | year = 1995 | title = Дощечки кохау ронгоронго из Кунсткамеры (The Kohau Rongorongo Tablets of the Kunstkamera) | location = St Petersburg | publisher = Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography }} {{ru icon}}

{{ cite book | author = du Feu, Veronica | year = 1996 | title = Rapanui | location = Oxon and New York | publisher = Routledge }}

{{ cite journal | author = Fischer, Steven Roger | year = 1997a | title = RongoRongo, the Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts | location = Oxford and New York | publisher = Oxford University Press }}

{{ cite book | author = ———— | year = 1997b | title = Glyphbreaker: A Decipherer's Story | location = New York | publisher = Springer–Verlag }}

{{ cite book | author = Fuentes, Jordi | year = 1960 | title = Dictionary & Grammar of the Easter Island Language | location = Santiago de Chile | publisher = Editorial Andrés Bello }} {{en icon}}{{es icon}}

{{cite journal | author = Guy, Jacques B. M. | authorlink = Jacques Guy | year = 1990 | title = On the Lunar Calendar of Tablet Mamari | url = http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/mamari.html | journal = Journal de la Société des Océanistes | volume = 91 | issue = 2 | pages = 135–149 | doi = 10.3406/jso.1990.2882 | deadurl = yes | archiveurl = https://web.archive.org/web/20080313061033/http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/mamari.html | archivedate = 2008-03-13 | df = }}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 1992 | title = À propos des mois de l'ancien calendrier pascuan (On the months of the old Easter Island calendar) | journal = Journal de la Société des Océanistes | volume = 94 | issue = 1 | pages = 119–125 | doi=10.3406/jso.1992.2611}} {{fr icon}}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 1998 | title = Un prétendu déchiffrement des tablettes de l'île de Pâques (A purported decipherment of the Easter Island tablets) | journal = Journal de la Société des Océanistes | volume = 106 | pages = 57–63 | doi=10.3406/jso.1998.2041}} {{fr icon}}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 1999a | title = Peut-on se fonder sur le témoignage de Métoro pour déchiffrer les rongo-rongo ? (Can one rely on the testimony of Metoro to decipher rongorongo?) | journal = Journal de la Société des Océanistes | volume = 108 | pages = 125–132 | doi=10.3406/jso.1999.2083}} {{fr icon}}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 1999b | title = Letter to the CEIPP | journal = Bulletin du CEIPP | volume = 28 }}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 2001 | title = Le calendrier de la tablette Mamari (The Calendar of the Mamari Tablet) | journal = Bulletin du CEIPP | volume = 47 | pages = 1–4 }} {{fr icon}}

{{ cite journal | author = Harrison, James Park | year = 1874 | title = The Hieroglyphics of Easter Island | journal = Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland | volume = 3 | pages = 370–83 | doi = 10.2307/2840910 | publisher = The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 3 | jstor = 2840910 }}

{{ cite journal | author = de Hevesy, Guillaume | year = 1932 | title = Lettre à M. Pelliot sur une écriture mystérieuse du bassin de l'Indus (Letter to Mr Pelliot on a mysterious script of the Indus Valley) | journal = Bulletins de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres | volume = 1932 | issue = 16 Sept. | pages = 310 }} {{fr icon}}

{{ cite journal | author = Horley, Paul | year = 2005 | title = Allographic Variations and Statistical Analysis of the Rongorongo Script | journal = Rapa Nui Journal | volume = 19 | issue = 2 | pages = 107–116 }}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 2009 | title = Review: Words out of wood: Proposals for the decipherment of the Easter Island script, by Mary de Laat | journal = Rapa Nui Journal | volume = 23 | issue = 2 | pages = 165–168 }}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 2010| title = Rongorongo tablet Keiti | journal = Rapa Nui Journal | volume = 24 | issue = 1 | pages = 45–56 }}

{{ cite book | author = de Laat, Mary | year = 2009 | title = Words Out of Wood: Proposals for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script | publisher = Eburon Uitgeverij B.V | location = The Netherlands}}

{{ cite book | author = Lemaître, Yves | year = 1960 | title = Lexique du Tahitien Contemporain | url = http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_6/divers1/42359.pdf | location = Paris | publisher = Éditions de l'Orstom }} {{fr icon}}

{{ cite book | author = Kudrjavtsev, Boris G. | year = 1995 | title = Письменность острова Пасхи (The Writing of Easter Island) | url = http://www.rongorongo.org/bk/index.htm | location = Saint Petersburg | series = Сборник Музея Антропологии и Этнографии (Compilation of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography) | volume = 11 | pages = 175–221 }} {{ru icon}}

{{ cite journal | author = Melka, Tomi | year = 2009 | title = Some Considerations about the Kohau Rongorongo Script in the Light of a Statistical Analysis of the 'Santiago Staff' | url = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1506456.1506460&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=25786544&CFTOKEN=60843670 | journal = Cryptologia | volume = 33 | issue = 1 | pages = 24–73 | doi = 10.1080/01611190802548998 }}

{{cite journal | author = Métraux, Alfred | authorlink = Alfred Métraux | year = 1939 | title = Mysteries of Easter Island | url = http://www.davidmetraux.com/daniel/docs/alfred/alfred_metraux_mysteries_of_easter_island.pdf | journal = Yale Review | volume = 28 | issue = 4 | pages = 758–779 | location = New Haven | publisher = Yale University | deadurl = yes | archiveurl = https://web.archive.org/web/20080406124306/http://www.davidmetraux.com/daniel/docs/alfred/alfred_metraux_mysteries_of_easter_island.pdf | archivedate = 2008-04-06 | df = }}

{{ cite journal | author = ———— | year = 1940 | title = Ethnology of Easter Island | journal = Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin | volume = 160 | location = Honolulu | publisher = Bernice P. Bishop Museum Press }}

{{cite journal|author=Pozdniakov, Konstantin |year=1996 |title=Les Bases du Déchiffrement de l'Écriture de l'Ile de Pâques (The Bases of Deciphering the Writing of Easter Island) |url=http://pozdniakov.free.fr/14%20paques%201996.pdf |journal=Journal de la Société des Océanistes |volume=103 |issue=2 |pages=289–303 |doi=10.3406/jso.1996.1995 |deadurl=yes |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20080625101810/http://pozdniakov.free.fr/14%20paques%201996.pdf |archivedate=2008-06-25 |df= }} {{fr icon}}

{{cite journal|author=———— |year=2011 |title=Tablet Keiti and calendar-like structures in Rapanui script |url=http://pozdniakov.free.fr/Keiti_preprint.pdf |journal= |volume= |pages= |doi=10.4000/jso.6371 |deadurl=yes |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110825011448/http://pozdniakov.free.fr/Keiti_preprint.pdf |archivedate=2011-08-25 |df= }}

{{cite journal|author=Pozdniakov, Konstantin |author2=Igor Pozdniakov |year=2007 |title=Rapanui Writing and the Rapanui Language: Preliminary Results of a Statistical Analysis |url=http://pozdniakov.free.fr/16%20Easter%20Island%20english.pdf |journal=Forum for Anthropology and Culture |volume=3 |pages=3–36 |deadurl=yes |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20080625101918/http://pozdniakov.free.fr/16%20Easter%20Island%20english.pdf |archivedate=2008-06-25 |df= }}

{{ cite book | author = Robinson, Andrew | year = 2002 | title = Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts | publisher = McGraw–Hill }}

{{ cite web | author = Sproat, Richard | year = 2003 | title = Approximate String Matches in the Rongorongo Corpus | url = http://rws.xoba.com/ror/ | accessdate = 2008-03-06 }}

{{cite conference|author=———— |year=2007 |title=Rongorongo |url=http://catarina.ai.uiuc.edu/LSA07/rongorongo.html |work=LSA 369: Writing Systems |location=the Linguistic Society of America Institute |publisher=Stanford University |accessdate=2008-03-06 |deadurl=bot: unknown |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20070504125122/http://catarina.ai.uiuc.edu/LSA07/rongorongo.html |archivedate=2007-05-04 |df= }}

{{ cite book | author = Thomson, William J. | year = 1891 | chapter = Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island | chapterurl = http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/ei/index.htm | title = Report of the United States National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1889 | series = Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution for 1889 | pages = 447–552 | location = Washington | publisher = Smithsonian Institution }}

External links

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20071017022436/http://www.rongorongo.org/ The Rongorongo of Easter Island.] Provides primary sources: Eyraud, Pinart, William Thomson, George Cooke, Routledge; old decipherments; Barthel's encodings, line by line; all of Barthel's numbered glyphs; and an English translation of Englert's dictionary
• Stéphen Chauvet (1935) Easter Island and its Mysteries, with early photos of many of the tablets, as well as the Jaussen list (p. 1, p. 2, p. 3, p. 4). The section on rongorongo is here.
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20080313062155/http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rongo.html Discussion by Steven Fischer, with critique by Jacques Guy]
• Richard Sproat's site, with a concordance of matched sequences
• Konstantin Pozdniakov's site, with publications
• Rongorongo on Spanish Wikipedia, covering several additional attempts at decipherment.