--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Chrisomalis" <schris1@...>
wrote:

> 2) The 'decipherment' itself is very weak, and the claims made are

limited.

It is demonstrably false. Take the segment of the Small Santiago
Tablet identified as a genealogy by Butinov and Knorozov. Its
structure is:

200 A B.76 200 B C.76 200 C D.76 200 D E.76....

If you apply Fischer's decipherment to it you get:

B by copulating with 200 produced B
C by copulating with 200 produced C
D by copulating with 200 produced D and so on.

This is absurd, whatever meanings you attribute to
B, C, D, and glyph 200.

> He identifies rongorongo as a mixed logographic/semasiographic

script

1. There are no known functional writing systems without a phonetic
element. Eric Thompson's dogged insistence that Maya had none
thwarted its decipherment for 50 years. Barthel, who dabbled into
Maya, thought the same of the rongorongo and got nowhere. If the rr
are purely ideographic (I loathe big words like "semasiographic"--why
on earth did Geoffrey Sampson peddle this monstrosity?) if the rr are
purely ideographic they are undecipherable because there is not enough
corpus, by far.

2. Konstantin Pozdniakov has brought evidence that the rr are composed
of a large phonetic element, that the limbs and heads of
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic glyphs are phonetic (syllables,
probably). Just like the letters of Korean are arranged into
Chinese-looking characters, the syllables of rongorongo would be
arranged into anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. But the
available corpus being riddled with errors (to which Fischer has
added his own), little is possible in the way of a reliable analysis.

> 3) I was certainly surprised that this hypothesis hadn't

been given

> much attention by earlier scholars. [post-1770 invention]

It has. Peter Bellwood mentions it in his "Man's Conquest of the
Pacific" published in 1979. Emory was the first to float the idea I
believe. So it's old hat. It makes as much sense as Thomas Huxley's
guess that the tablets were not writing, but tapa stamps; or that the
signs were "reminders" like knots in a handkerchief (I think Routledge
floated that one). The only theory I haven't seen yet is that the
glyphs are natural formations, the local equivalents of crop circles
as it were.