A wooden fish could help linguists learn more about the writing system known as rongorongo
On the outskirts of Hanga Roa, Easter Island’s only town, the Museo Rapa Nui has a small but striking collection. It includes a rare female version of the monolithic statues known as moai, and sets of piercing moai eyes made from white coral and red volcanic rock. (0) With so much to see, it’s easy to overlook the carved wooden fish in a glass cabinet. Raised on a stand, as if held up by a proud fisherman, it is the colour of chocolate and roughly the size and shape of an oar blade.
This unique fish represents a great – and unsolved – linguistic puzzle. (19)
. Some resemble human forms, animals and plants, while others are more abstract – circles, crosses, squares. This is rongorongo, the only indigenous writing system to develop in Oceania before the 20th century and one of the last remaining mysteries on Easter Island.
According to oral traditions, rongorongo tablets were brought to the island by the first settlers between the years 800 and 1200. (20)
. Some believe it long predated European contact in 1722, while others argue it emerged as late as the 1770s, after the Rapanui people saw European writing for the first time during a Spanish expedition to the island.
Since then, the Rapanui population has faced disease, epidemics, piracy, slavery and religious indoctrination, leading to its inevitable decline. Sadly, the same has happened to rongorongo – only a fragmentary understanding of the script has survived among the Rapanui locals. Over the years, there have been various attempts to decipher the script, but it has proved a difficult task. (21)
. Only 26 rongorongo objects exist, some have only a few lines of text.
A major breakthrough happened in the 1990s when the key to the script’s structure was proposed. Based on years of research and contrary to some previous assumptions, it is now argued that the language’s similarities with Western writing are few – mainly just the linearity and left-to-right reading direction. Rongorongo is a word-writing script and each sign represents an object whose name is to be spoken aloud. (22)
. Building on them, the reader fills in a good deal of unwritten text from memory. And human memory is unreliable.
We still remain a long way from being able to read long passages of rongorongo. Only limited information has been gathered from Rapanui people, and most of it still cannot be identified. (23)
. Researchers have announced an algorithm that could automatically decipher a lost language, without needing advanced knowledge of its relation to other languages. Although the researchers didn’t look at rongorongo, their work could potentially help to improve our understanding of the script.
Linguists, who highlight the importance of including Rapanui people in efforts to decipher the tablets, aren’t optimistic that rongorongo will ever be fully understood. Nevertheless, the indecipherable glyphs still generate significant pride on the island, as well as intrigue. (24)
. On the other hand, the script is as much a mystery for them as for the rest of the world.
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