Re: Rongorongo (Fischer)

Stephen Chrisomalis recently said:

> My thoughts:
> 1) The section dealing with the history of decipherment attempts, which
> comprises over half the book, is a very interesting and very thorough
> summary of research [snip] He is also extremely arrogant and vituperative at
> times, which makes for difficult reading, and certainly isn't good from a
> history of science perspective. Strikingly, he condemns and insults
> deceased researchers with far greater vigour than living ones (even ones
> with whom he disagrees violently).

I thought the historical section very useful (and the section detailing the
known inscriptions). I did find his opinions intrusive as I was reading as
he often doesn't separate them from the historical commentry and they are
mentioned in the same writing style as facts. (He rarely say "I think
that".) His own theories tend to be mentioned as "it has been shown that..."
without crediting himself.

I would note in passing that under English law it is not possible to libel a
dead person.

> 2) The 'decipherment' itself is very weak, and the claims made are limited.
> He identifies rongorongo as a mixed logographic/semasiographic script and
> purports to have identified certain texts as chants of a certain form. From
> what I can see, Fischer's claims in the book are weaker than those he has
> made elsewhere (including the web site linked above). Even at their most
> extreme, the claims for decipherment are much weaker than our state of
> present knowledge of, say, Linear A.

I would agree we are nowhere near a full decipherment. In my view Fischer
seems to extend his theory to a wider range of inscriptions than perhaps is
warrented. I am also rather wary of procreation chants which have seemingly
unconnected combinations of parent and child. If such combinations can be
independently supported by evidence from say, a verbal tradition, that is
fine. If not there is a danger of inventing something completely spurious
which is unverifiable.

> 3) From my perspective (which is more archaeological than linguistic,
> admittedly), Fischer's most interesting positive contribution is the theory
> that the rongorongo is a script (consisting of logograms and semasiograms,
> possibly) but that it is of post-contact origin, arising only after the
> inhabitants of Rapanui witnessed Spanish writing in 1770 (the first
> substantial contact with the West). The idea is that they picked up the
> notion of writing but not much else and adapted their earlier pictographic
> tradition into a script (stimulus diffusion). I'm not sure the case has been
> proven, but I was certainly surprised that this hypothesis hadn't been given
> much attention by earlier scholars.

I agree it is an interesting theory, (and to my mind a likely one) but I
suspect little further confirmation can be made without a better
understanding of the texts.

One thing that surprised me was the comment that there was no computerised
database of the texts. Clearly the issue of how to represent them is
significant. Has any progress been made on this since the book was written?

Tim

--
Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer