Re: Rongorongo (Fischer)

jacques_b_m_guy wrote:

>
> --- 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.

Hi, Jacques! So, what does he claim about this text?

> > 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

It's what he does. (See his earlier political books disguised as
histories of linguistics.) But the term is actually Gelb's, and is used
more by French writers than English.

> 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

That's Martha Macri's approach, also.

> 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.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...