Konstantin Pozdniakov,INALCO, IUF, LLACAN

Looking for proper names in the Rapanui script

Peter the Great Museum (Kunstkamera),

St. Petersburg

Boris Kudriavtsev: a discovery of parallel texts

Dmitrij Olderogge

Yuri Knorozov

Irina Fedorova

Hunting for personal names

« Genealogy » by KnorozovGv6

In the history of the Rongorongo studies, the most known attempt to find proper names was that by Yurij Knorozov and Nicolai Butinov, who suggested that a short fragment of the text Gv is a genealogy.This fragment has a very unusual structure: it consists of short groups where the second sign of every group is repeated as the first sign of the next group: AB – BC – CD – DE – EF.

« Genealogy » by Knorozov

When he successfully deciphered the Rongorongo script of Easter Island Steven Roger Fischer gained a unique place in the pantheon of glyphbreakers. He is the only person who has ever deciphered not one but two ancient scripts. Fischer's previous decipherment, of a Cretan artifact called the Phaistos Disk, provided the key to the ancient Minoan language and showed it to be closely related to Mycenaean Greek.

Atua Mata Riri

A creation chant collected by Thomson in 1886 is supposed to give a list of gods.This chant was obtained from old Ure-vai-ko, who recited it as the text of a tablet. A translation made by Salmon is equally free., as he assumed that the procreators were all gods whose names were meaningless, and thus misunderstood the true nature of the chant. The text given here is based on Thomson's and corrected by natives, but many verses are not intelligible.

1.God-of-the-angry-look by copulating with Roundness (?) produced the poporo (Solanum nigrum).2.Himahima-marao by copulating with Lichen-growing-on-the-soil produced the lichen.3.Oevai (?) by copulating with Fern produced the fern.4.The Parent-mother by copulating with Pipiri-hai-tau produced wood.5.Dryness by copulating with Humu-toti (Tattooing-of-the-leg) produced the paper mulberry.6.Ti by copulating with Ta [Tattooing] produced the ti.7.Elevation (?) by copulating with Highness produced the inland-grass.

We cannot accept the deciphering of the “genealogical myth” suggested by S. Fischer, but everybody agrees that the famous Santiago staff analysed by Fischer does have a very special structure being divided into groups of three graphemes each.

4 + 2: 2 + 4:

2 + 2 + 2:

X and Y produced many twins:

Important common feature – the sign76

Text Gv:

sign 76 in the last grapheme

« rising » direction: son > father

Text I:

sign 76 in the first grapheme

« Descending » direction: father > son

• More than 550 generations ???

• More than 11000 years ???

Igor Pozdniakov (1.06.1927 – 16.1.2010)

    N N N NINTERVAL   Language L Names Writing W Names

1 ro-ro 45 109 131 1542 ro-ngo-ro-ngo 125 264 253 252

20 ro (19 syllables) ro 94 140 152 176TOTAL   264 513 536 582

norm = 33% % % % %

INTERVAL Language L Names Writing W Names

1 17 21 24 262 47 51 47 43

20 36 27 28 30TOTAL 100 100 100 100

POZDNIAKOV, K. and G. SEGERER. Similar Place Avoidance: A Statistical Universal. Linguistic Typology. 2007. Vol. 11(2), p. 307-348.

norm = 33% % % % %

INTERVAL Language L Names Writing W Names

1 17 21 24 262 47 51 47 43

20 36 27 28 30TOTAL 100 100 100 100

Fermin Moscoso del Prado. The universal “shape” of human languages: spectral analysis beyond speech // Nature Precedingshttp://precedings.nature.com/documents/6097/version/1

Another candidats for proper naming

• one of the most perspective strategies of deciphering is looking for all unusual signs that seem to have no phonetic reading.

Many fragments of the Rapanui script have a very special structure: the text is divided into short segments separated by delimiters.

A delimiter is a regularly occurring sign (like sign 76 in the Santiago Staff) or a combination of two or three signs

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Ev Ev

Na Na

Gr Gr

Kr

Kv

Ca Ca Ca

Cb

Aa Aa

Ab Ab Ab

= = =

Ca3

Ab4

Aa8

= = = = = =

Ca3

Ab4

Aa8

Pr7Hr8Qr7

« Calendar » - text C

Sign 380,captured byPaul Horley

Tracing of Paul Horley

Text C

Sign turning as comlexification

Text C

«Decipherement» from S. Fischer

Pv7Qv8 Hv5

FR38

Pv7Qv8 Hv5

Db4Db6 xxSb6

FR38

Pv7Qv8 Hv5

Db4Db6 xxSb6

FR38

Pv7 Barthel Pv7 HorleyHv5

Db4

Db6 xx

Sb6 Barthel

Sb6 Horley

Un signe

Catalog I.Pozdniakov – K.Pozdniakov

 

It is quite probable that the scribe created the elaborated block in line Na3 being motivated by a necessity (functional or aesthetic) to extend some basic structure to a mirror-like one: the bird sign is set in the center of the composition, surrounded by three pairs of mirrored graphemes according to the pattern: A B C D C B A.

Such «graphical polindroms», most possibly, do not have any phonetic base.

C B A? C B A B C DC B A