Rongorongo ("recitation" in the Rapa Nui language), one of three scripts of Easter Island, a others existence the ''ta'u and mama scripts''. Just Xxvi rongorongo texts remain, along by having Sextet ta'u & Ii mama texts. Completely tercet scripts come carved onto wooden boards, & come understand inside reverse boustrophedon fashion (bottom to top). More than 1 tablet, which has been shown to exist as the lunar calendar, these remain undeciphered. When by having virtually 100% undeciphered scripts, there are all manner of fanciful interpretations & claimed translations of the rongorongo texts. It has as well been suggested that rongorongo is non the writing system proper but the genealogy, a mnemonic device, or the choreography.

Within 1862, Peruvian slave ships captured nearly a entire people of Easter Island. A leftover people doesn't seem to keep close at h& been literate person, and noesis of training review a scripts was misused.

Around 1866 a Catholic bishop in Tahiti, Florentin Jaussen, worked by owning Metoro Taouaouré to produce [http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/jaussen.html a list of rongorongo signs and translations]. But, a 'translations' use been there is no serve within deciphering rongorongo, & several suspect that Taouaouré did non actually understand a script. Around 1949, [http://www.rongorongo.org/bk/index.htm Boris Kudrjavtsev] noticed the perennial sequence around both tablets, which has since been incurred around others. Thomas Barthel published delineation of the entire corpus within 1958, and showed that one of a tablets occurs as lunar calendar. By 1971 he had reduced a inventory of signs to Long hundred. Late a signs for 'moon', 'lizard', & a god Tane were identified, and coalesced glyphs were recognized. Steven Fischer published a corpus over agaaround in 1993. He suggests that the island-dweller developed a script once encountering writing when a Spanish ship out within Easter Island in 1770. Low, [http://www.rongorongo.org/ rongorongo.org] has be a central source for info just about a script, including the primary sources describing it & complete transcriptions of its texts. Its anon. creator is skeptical just about tries to decipher a script however recognizes a key advances towards understanding it.

Martha Macri of the University of California at Davis, who has as well worked on the Mayan script, suggests that the majority of the glyphs come in point of fact consolidated compounds of the limited placed of basic signs. the total one signs, which she counts at less than Lxx, suggests that Rongorongo can be a syllabary augmented by perhaps the twelve logograms, as 5Cinque would exist as compulsory for the pure syllabic script of decade consonants & 5 vowels (10×5 consonant-vowel syllables + 5 vowel-lone syllables). A suspected logograph, like a lunar crescent & a lizard mentioned above, don't form compounds. Numerous of the basic signs pop up to exist as cognate by owning petroglyphs found in a area of the island. the total of signs fused together (1 to Four or even Phoebe, averaging astir Two) suggests that both of the big units can represent a word. Indeed, this "is consistent with the assertion of islanders that each graphic unit represents a single word". In case the script is indeed a syllabic script, & especially whenever it's divided into words in the European fashion, this would trend lines Fischer's guide that a idea for writing come from either European explorers across contact diffusion. [When people are exposed to the idea of phonetic writing, without understanding the alphabetic system, and then set out to create scripts of their own, they usually create syllabaries. E.g., Cherokee of the US, Vai of Liberia, Afaka of Suriname. Even so, a couple of lawsuits i have of scripts created ex nihilo around ancient days (Sumerian/Egyptian/Elamite, Shang/Chinese, Olmec/Mayan) come logogram-depending systems.]