The Corpus Problem in the RongoRongo Studies

Abstract During years, a number of tentative decipherments have been proposed in regard to the clustering symbols that form the assumed rongorongo script of Easter Island. The legitimacy of the claims, despite their originality, boldness and/or strangeness, remains largely untested due to a major disadvantage: the physical material that comprises the rongorongo script is scarce and restricted. In a similar fashion, the RR corpus problem overlaps a number of non-deciphered scripts’ corpora that have the same disadvantage, such as the pseudo-hieroglyphs of Byblos, the Isthmian script of Mesoamerica, the Olmec hieroglyphs, and the symbols of the Cretan Phaistos disc. Engagement with corpus linguistics literature is deemed vital in focusing on the current situation of RR, and also in how to plausibly surmount the perceived difficulties. Careful considerations based on a theoretical and practical framework show that a new transliteration system agreed by consensus needs to be implemented. Structural and statistical analysis, comparisons and annotations should be made in all the body of non-skewed and skewed texts to validate any working hypothesis, while opting for and confirming the right model for data analysis under unfavorable circumstances.

[1]  Homogeneity in Old Rapanui , 1992 .

[2]  T. Heyerdahl.  The art of Easter Island , 1975 .

[3]  Jack Tresidder.  The Complete Dictionary of Symbols , 2004 .

[4]  Catherine Orliac,et al.  The Rongorongo tablets from Easter Island: botanical identification and 14C dating , 2005 .

[5]  C. F. Hockett,et al.  The World's Writing Systems , 1997 .

[6]  Hideki Kozima,et al.  Text Segmentation Based on Similarity between Words , 1993, ACL.

[7]  Stephen Chauvet.  L'Île de Pâques et ses mystères , 1935 .

[8]  Wolfgang Teubert,et al.  Corpus Linguistics: A Short Introduction , 2007 .

[9]  Elena Tognini-Bonelli,et al.  Corpus Linguistics at Work , 2002, Computational Linguistics.

[10]  M. Dossena.  Towards a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish correspondence , 2004 .

[11]  A. Robinson.  Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts , 2002 .

[12]  Tony Berber Sardinha.  Corpus linguistics: readings in a widening discipline , 2007 .

[13]  Patrick V. Kirch,et al.  The evolution of the Polynesian chiefdoms , 1985 .

[14]  G. Mendenhall,et al.  The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos , 1987 .

[15]  Anneli Meurman-Solin.  The Manuscript-Based Diachronic Corpus of Scottish Correspondence , 2007 .

[16]  J. Justeson,et al.  A Decipherment of Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing , 1993, Science.

[17]  T. Barthel.  The ``Talking Boards'' of Easter Island , 1958 .

[18]  G. McCall.  Rapanui: Tradition and Survival on Easter Island , 1981 .

[19]  A. Métraux.  1. Two Easter Island Tablets in Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu , 1938 .

[20]  Sassoon.  Signs, Symbols and Icons: Pre-History to the Computer Age , 1997 .

[21]  Matti Rissanen,et al.  English Historical Corpora: Report on Developments in 1995. , 1996 .

[22]  Margaret Laing.  The Linguistic Analysis of Medieval Vernacular Texts: Two Projects at Edinburgh , 1994 .

[23]  Glenn J. Myatt.  Making Sense of Data I: A Practical Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining , 2006 .

[24]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Representativeness in corpus design , 1993 .

[25]  Klaus U. Schulz,et al.  Information Access to Historical Documents from the Early New High German Period , 2006, Digital Historical Corpora.

[26]  Matti Rissanen.  The diachronic corpus as a window to the history of English , 1992 .

[27]  Konstantin Pozdniakov.  Les bases du déchiffrement de l'écriture de l'île de Pâques , 1996 .

[28]  R. Parmentier.  Rongorongo, The Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts. , 1998 .

[29]  S. Fischer.  Preliminary evidence for cosmogonic texts in Rapanui's rongorongo inscriptions , 1995 .

[30]  Hermann Moisl,et al.  Taming Digital Voices and Texts: Models and Methods for Handling Unconventional Diachronic Corpora , 2007 .

[31]  Gabriel Altmann,et al.  Towards a Theory of Word Length Distribution , 1994, J. Quant. Linguistics.

[32]  Andrew Wilson,et al.  Corpus linguistics : an introduction. , 2001 .

[33]  George Nagy,et al.  Optical character recognition: an illustrated guide to the frontier , 1999, Electronic Imaging.

[34]  Tomi S. Melka.  Structural Observations Regarding RongoRongo Tablet ‘Keiti’ , 2008, Cryptologia.

[35]  Ingo W. D. Hackh.  The History of the Alphabet , 2007 .

[36]  M. Stubbs.  Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture , 1996 .

[37]  ALBERT J. Mott.  Easter Island , 1879, Nature.

[38]  T. Heyerdahl,et al.  Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific. , 1968 .

[39]  A. P. B. Sardinha.  Corpus linguistics - investigating language structure and use , 1999 .

[40]  Reinhard Köhler.  Text Corpus as an Abstract Data Structure , 2007 .

[41]  Fernando Cervantes.  Mesoamerican writing systems: Propaganda, myth, and history in four ancient civilizations , 1995 .

[42]  Leta Hunt,et al.  InscriptiFact: A virtual archive of ancient inscriptions from the Near East , 2005, International Journal on Digital Libraries.

[43]  A. Métraux.  Ethnology of Easter Island , 1940 .

[44]  Graeme Hirst,et al.  Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text , 1991, CL.

[45]  S. Houston,et al.  Oldest Writing in the New World , 2006, Science.

[46]  Geoffrey Leech.  Corpus Annotation Schemes , 1993 .

[47]  Graeme D. Kennedy,et al.  Book Reviews: An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics , 1999, CL.

[48]  David Mittendorf Ingo Willis.  Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500 - 1850 , 2004 .

[49]  J. Laughlin.  Archaeology and the Bible , 1999 .

[50]  K. Routledge.  The Mystery of Easter Island: The Story of an Expedition , 1920 .

[51]  G. Leech.  Corpora and theories of linguistic performance , 1992 .

[52]  Terttu Nevalainen,et al.  Historical sociolinguistics: The corpus of early english correspondence , 2007 .

[53]  S. Pincock.  Codebreaker: The History of Codes and Ciphers , 2006 .

[54]  C. Meyer.  English Corpus Linguistics An Introduction , 2002 .

[55]  Tomi S. Melka.  THE MOCHE LIMA BEANS RECORDING SYSTEM, REVISITED , 2010 .

[56]  Robert M. Langdon.  The Lost Caravel , 1975 .

[57]  Emmerich Kelih,et al.  Quantitative methods in linguistics , 2010, J. Quant. Linguistics.

[58]  Brian E. Colles.  The Byblos Syllaby and the Proto-alphabet , 1992 .

[59]  Dawn Archer,et al.  Tagging Historical Corpora - the problem of spelling variation , 2006, Digital Historical Corpora.

[60]  Tomi S. Melka.  Some Considerations about the Kohau Rongorongo Script in the Light of a Statistical Analysis of the ‘Santiago Staff’ , 2009, Cryptologia.

[61]  Richard Xiao,et al.  Corpus Creation , 2010, Handbook of Natural Language Processing.

[62]  Nelleke Oostdijk.  A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Linguistic Variation , 1988 .

[63]  Susan Pintzuk,et al.  The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English , 2003 .