--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, timpart@... wrote:

> Do you mean the original writers have made mistakes, or the

available

> encoding is inaccurate?

Both. Here there is a whole glyph missing, there it's
a line missing from a glyph, there again a glyph has
a line added which is not in the photographs where it
can be seen.

Errors again in the encoding. A whole glyph missing,
another incorrectly identified, another coded as
illegible or erased when it is perfectly visible
and identifiable.

And the list of glyphs is very incomplete. You have
about 700 in Barthel's list. The CEIPP's Rongorongo
Commission has been checking Barthel's drawings against
his original rubbings and photos when available. They
have identified some 2300 glyphs so far. Sure, many will
be allographs, but you cannot know that until you
have catalogued them all. They also estimate the
proportion of errors in Barthel's corpus at 7 to 10%

> And by Fischer's mistakes do you mean his

drawings

> or something else he has done?

His drawings, since he has done nothing else, no encoding,
no nomenclature of the glyphs. Sometimes the differences
with Barthel are so gross that you think your eyes are
playing tricks on you. Look at the glyph of line 12 of
the Santiago Staff according to Barthel. Wait a second...
let me find it... you can see it there:

http://www.rongorongo.org/i/i012.html

Now look at the same according to Fischer... let me find
it (I am writing an article about the Santiago Staff, that's
how I noticed). It's page 451 of his book. I haven't seen
it on the Web, and I don't think you can post even small
gifs here, so you'll have to look it up. Anyway, it is
glyph 421 of Barthel's nomenclature (you can find it on
the site above (click on "Hieroglyphs" under "Resources").
But, in Barthel's drawing, it is glyph 53. 421 and 53 look
_nothing at all_ like each other.

Even the _numbering_ of the lines of the Staff is wrong.
And further, if you try and reconstitute what it must
look like, you see 13 lines on its thick end and 14 lines
on its thin end. That makes no sense. There are no photos
of it, apart from a shot of its middle showing a 10cm-wide
segment of lines 4 and 5. Remember: the Staff is 125cm long
and has 14 lines of signs. So the only photo of it covers
only a little over 1% of it. ONE percent! Fischer claims
to have examined the Staff but he does not mention any of
the problems with its line-numbering. And where did he
see that glyph 421 at the beginning of line 12? There is
a photo of careful drawings of it (probably by Philippi) in
Heyerdahl and Ferdon (vol. 2, fig. 193). It shows glyph 53 as
the initial. So? It is a scandalous mess and has been one
for almost 50 years now.