--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>

> Hi, Jacques! So, what does [Fischer] claim about this text?


pp.443-444: (RR8 is what everyone else calls G, a.k.a.
Small Santiago Tablet, RR10 what everyone else calls
I, a.k.a. Santiago Staff--just gratuitous obfuscation.
So: RR8v6 = Small Santiago, v[erso], [line] 6,
RR8r2 = Small Santiago, r[ecto], [line] 2, and so on)

------------------begin quote--------------------------
Butinov and Knorozov (1956: 87-90) segmented RR8v into
several passages which they believed begin with glyph 200.
The two Russians identified these segments as genealogies
that name descendants together with their ancestors.
Butinov (1959:74) expanded this idea later, positing a
tentative "reading" of RR8v6 (reading backwards "for ease
of reproduction"): "1) Octopus, 2) Shark, son of Octopus,
3) Turtle, son of Shark, 4) Crab, son of Turtle". He also
professed (ibid., P. 77) to identify on RR 8r2 seven
segments designating the process of catching fish, reading
the text "ideographically". Later, Butinov (1960a, 1961)
believed he had discovered a genealogy of the names of six
"Long-Ears and Short-Ears" in RR 8v5-6, again reading
"ideographically". Barthel (1957: 79, fn 105) agreed that
RR8v6 had to be "a genealogical topic", though in his
Grundlagen (Barthel, 1958a) he had denied the existence of
genealogies in rongorongo inscriptions. In his critique of
Butinov 1960a, Barthel (1963c) suggested his own
genealogical "reading" of RR 8v5-6, but one still placing
glyph 200 at the start of each isolated segment and the
phallus-suffixed glyph at the end of each isolated segment.
In 1993, as a result of the provisional identification on
the "Staff " (RR 10) of similar triads as procreation
formulae, I could demonstrate that isolated segments on
RR8v were procreation triads and that the text of this side of
the tablet was probably a cosmogony, as with RR 10 and 11a
(Fischer, 1993b, 1995a, b). Barthel has since endorsed this
[but no reference here]. Most of RR 8v appears to reiterate
the statement "X ki 'ai ki roto 'o Y: ka pa te Z", or "X
copulated with Y: There issued forth Z". Here each X is the
glyph that bears the phallus 76 as a suffix; glyph X fronts
each item of procreation.

This discovery was the first scientifically verifiable
breakthrough in a phonetic [sic] reading of the rongorongo
script.
----------------------end quote-------------------------

> > 2. Konstantin Pozdniakov[...] Just like the letters of Korean are
arranged into
> > Chinese-looking characters, the syllables of rongorongo would be
> > arranged into anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures.

> That's Martha Macri's approach, also.

It is sufficient to believe that the rr are writing with
a phonetic component; the hypothesis that limbs are
syllables follows naturally. Pozdniakov, however, has
brought forth excellent evidence. In a nutshell: limb
shapes which alternate freely in anthropomorphic and
zoomorphic signs are seen to alternate in the same manner
when occurring as parts of geometric signs. His demonstration
is difficult to follow because he is confined in the
straightjacket of Barthel's coding system. And "difficult"
is an understatement. In my view, Barthel's system was
under construction and he abandoned everything once he
thought he had "cracked the code". Fifty years later we
are left with a mess and an unreliable corpus. Just one
example of the absurdity of Barthel's 3-digit system: the
first digit represents the head, the second the feet, the
last the arms. If the glyphs are composed from top to bottom
that amounts to coding English "composed" as "com-sed-po".
But it has long been known that they were composed from
bottom to top: "composed" then becomes "sed-com-po".
Go try and crack English with such a system. At any rate,
you cannot sensibly represent units of 5 elements with 3
decimal digits.