Re: VMs: Image Source, Accuracy of Transcriptions

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

30/08/2003 3:53:21 AM, illumin8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:


>Now let me throw a little gasoline on the fire... What do you think of
>the late (and great IMHO) Barry Fell's decipherment of the Rongos?

Well... you asked for it.

Stuff and nonsense.

Fell's interpretations are based on Metoro's chants, which I
have demonstrated to be so much hogwash, in an article in
the Journal de la Société des Océanistes. Just one example.
Metoro's chants feature many occurrences of a verbal particle
"kua". That particle does not exist in the language of Rapanui.
It occurs nowhere in any of the texts collected by Sebastian
Englert. However, there is a verbal particle 'ua in Tahitian.
All the k's in Rapanui are glottal stops (') in Tahitian, viz
Rapanui ika "fish", Tahitian i'a (ditto). Metoro just made up
Rapanui-sounding words out of Tahitian. I strongly suspect that
he was no Rapanui, just a Tahitian bullshit artist.

The only reliable modern scholar on the subject is Konstantin
Pozdniakov. According to him, the "limbs" of rongorongo
signs actually are phonetic symbols. Say, the uplifted arm
of this sign is actually a syllable. Much like Korean, which
at first sight looks like a Chinese-like writing system, but
is in fact an alphabet. But Pozdniakov's only published paper,
in French, is impossibly difficult to follow. Why? Because
of the transcription system. He follows Barthel's. Rightly so,
because Barthel is the standard. But that makes his argument
so obscure that I bet that no-one can understand it.

What is admirable about Pozdniakov is that he had a 500-page
book in print, with Gallimard. But he did put a stop to it.
"There really was nothing new there", he told me.

The true reason, I suspect, is that he saw that his tentative
decipherment was not sufficiently grounded, and that he 
decided not to go ahead with this book.

Now that is the hallmark of a true scholar. My hat off to
Pozdniakov.

>Fell mentions
>Gaugin's painting "Merahi metua no Teha'amana = Ancestors of Teha'amana"
>(1893)

Nonsense again. Some of the signs in that painting the wrong side
up. Even the title (Merahi metua...) is mangled Tahitian. 
Tehamana, at any rate, was a Tongan.



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