The decipherment of rongorongo began with the discovery of the rongorongo tablets on Easter Island in the late nineteenth century. As with most undeciphered scripts, many of the proposals have been fanciful. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, comprising only 15,000 legible glyphs; the lack of context in which to interpret the texts, such as illustrations or parallels to texts which can be read; and the fact that the modern Rapanui language is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets—especially if they record a specialized register such as incantations—while the few remaining examples of the old language are heavily restricted in genre and may not correspond well to the tablets either. Since a proposal by Butinov and Knorozov in the 1950s, the majority of philologists, linguists, and cultural historians have taken the line that rongorongo was not true writing but proto-writing, that is, an ideographic- and rebus-based mnemonic device. If it is the case that rongorongo is proto-writing, then it is unlikely to ever be deciphered. Oral history suggests that only a small elite were ever literate, and that the tablets were considered sacred.
Read the rest of this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_rongorongo> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1242: Northern Crusades: In the Battle of the Ice, Novgorod forces led by Alexander Nevsky rebuffed an invasion attempt by the Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus on the present-day border of Estonia and Russia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Ice> 1614: Native American Pocahontas married English colonist John Rolfe in Virginia, and was christened Lady Rebecca. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas> 1879: A decades-long border dispute between Chile and Bolivia over control of the saltpeter-rich Atacama Desert and other territories escalated into the War of the Pacific. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific> 1976: The Tiananmen Incident, a protest against the repression of the Chinese regime nearing the end of the Cultural Revolution, took place in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Incident> 1992: Bosnian War: Serb gunmen killed two people while firing upon a large crowd of anti-war protesters in Sarajevo, marking the start of the Siege of Sarajevo. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: soigné (adj): Fashionable and elegant; well-groomed <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soign%C3%A9> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak. --Booker T. Washington <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington> _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Daily Article mailing list. To unsubscribe, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l Questions or comments? Contact [email protected]
