Rapanui Writing and the Rapanui Language: Preliminary Results of a Statistical Analysis
Résumé
One of the main aims of this article was to present concrete arguments which will show that we are indeed dealing with an original writing system, and not with pictography or with some sort of mnemonic code for preserving information or with any other pre-literary form. We need these arguments because many professional philologists and cultural historians are still sceptical about the written texts of Easter Island. The scepticism of philologists who are acquainted with the history of the development of the world’s writing systems is entirely justified from the typological point of view: original systems of writing are not known to have come into being on distant islands, thousands of miles from the nearest shore, which have spent many centuries in complete cultural isolation. For this aim we used various statistical tests. The problem was that statistics ruled out many erroneous approaches to decipherment. If we use a wrong catalog of signs, it is clear that our counts will lead to a wrong conlusions. It was a case of Rongorongo. There was no any reliable catalog of Rongorongo signs (all the scolars used the catalog of Barthel which contains many ligatures and allographs). So in this article I have published for the first time my own catalog based on the analysis of all parllel texts and fragments. Our statistics based on this catalog differs radically from previous statistical data.
According to a dozen statistical criteria, there is a strike correlation between the Rapanui language and the Rongorongo writing. The following conclusions can be drawn:
a)we are dealing with a proper writing system;
b) this writing system is based upon the Rapanui language (or a language with similar statistical characteristics, for instance another East Polynesian language);
c) the writing system is primarily syllabic (nevertheless, statistical analysis of the samples of the language does suggest that some of the glyphs in the Rongorongo writing may represent words rather than syllables).