Miguel Valério

Abstract

The highly iconic script of Easter Island or Rapa Nui, conventionally called Rongorongo, is one of a handful of potential cases of primary invention of writing. It is therefore key for the history of this phenomenon worldwide. The nature of Rongorongo is still debated, but several of its characteristics, such as the number of signs and their arrangement in linear sequences, strongly suggest that it constitutes proper writing. In this case, one would expect Rongorongo to notate Rapanui, the Polynesian language of Easter Island. According to the main definition in use, in order to be considered writing a system of notation should contain not only semantic signs, but also signs capable of representing speech sounds. This has not yet been fully demonstrated for Rongorongo, however, because it remains undeciphered.

Pozdniakov has established that most inscriptions, especially the longer ones on wooden ‘tablets’ or ‘boards’, differ sharply from Text I or Santiago’s Staff. Pozdniakov and Horley have also shown that this significant portion of the corpus (some twelve inscriptions) comprises textual types consistent with lists and repetitive contents, including possibly “poems” or “chants”. Following this trail, this paper focuses on the epigraphic specificities of Text I and argues that they are consistent with it recording natural language and grammatical features more closely. Namely, this inscription employs dividers for possible sentences or groups of sentences (‘paragraphs’) and certain signs in distributions that contrast much with their use in the rest of the corpus.

The patterns in Text I can be compared against syntactical and morphological features of the Rapanui language, especially at its earlier attested stage in the late 19th and early 20th century (“older Rapanui”) and help to formulate new hypotheses on how the script functioned. Evidence will be presented in support of the hypothesis that Rongorongo is a morpho-phonographic script, with semantic as well as phonetic signs. Like most inventions of writing, one would expect phonetic signs in Rongorongo to be syllabic, which has been the operating assumption of past scholarship. And since the syllabic structure of the language is limited to V and CV types, we would also expect to find these types in the script. However, this starting assumption is at odds with the evidence that no Rongorongo sign patterns like the super-frequent Rapanui monosyllabic ‘functional words’, including the aspect and nominal predicate marker he, the article te, possessive o and ’a, the preposition ki ‘to’, etc. Thus, the investigation of the possible phonetic signs of Rongorongo must build on the hypothesis that, like the early stages of other invented scripts (e.g. archaic Sumerian cuneiform), its spellings omitted certain grammatical features.

Session 3

Thursday, 14 January 2021, 16:50