Evolution of Languages and Writings (Time Maps Book 3) by Fisher Martini & Fisher R.K

Author:Fisher, Martini & Fisher, R.K. [Fisher, Martini]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Rongorongo

We don’t know what the rongorongo documents contain but there are some reasonable suppositions. Four broad topics seem to dominate all the writings that have survived for us from early cultures. They are religion; other traditions and ceremonies, including myths and legends concerned with nature and the organization of society, and often also the genealogies of kings or rulers; agricultural and ceremonial calendars; and commercial transactions and the control of wealth or assets. The first three of these are often not clearly separated but commercial documents tend to be distinctive and comparatively easy to identify. Therefore, it is very likely that the texts relate to religious and cultural traditions, and we know that they also include some calendrical information. The fact that some old men were able to consistently and independently recite chants associated with specific rongorongo texts (but could not read the texts themselves) is compatible with this hypothesis. Nobody would bother to memorise and recite inventories or accounting ledgers.

One problem that may have serious consequences for the decipherment is that there is very little evidence of change or development of the characters. This suggests that either they were all created within a fairly short period (a matter of a few centuries) prior to the 1862 disaster or else they were copied very carefully from earlier versions with no modifications at all. In the first case, there is a good possibility that the language may be identifiable if enough comparative textual material is available but in the second case we face the fact that language changes are continuous while the written form of a language is relatively static. It may be that to the Easter Islanders the texts were the equivalent of texts in Latin or Sanskrit to modern Europeans – not in a living language, and subject to debate and interpretation even among specialists. In such a case the problems of decipherment will be much greater.

CODES, CIPHERS AND SHORTHANDS

Codes are usually intended to conceal information from most people while making it available to a chosen few. There are also commercial codes, telegraphic codes, Morse Code, semaphore signals and others, but many of these are now going out of use as modern communication systems render them unnecessary. Shorthands are usually substitution ciphers that are rapid enough to record spoken speech. Samuel Pepys kept his famous diary in such a shorthand and for many years it was believed to be in code. Since a hundred words makes up more than half of our speech, most shorthands use logographs for those words and phonetic symbols for the remainder. So shorthands are usually logophonetic scripts. Most major languages have at least one shorthand system. Even the ancient Romans had a shorthand, called Tironian because it was invented by a man named Marcus Tullius Tiro, used for recording speeches in the Senate. The Byzantines, Chinese, Germans, French, and Russians all have shorthands suited to the needs of their own languages. English has dozens of them.

ANCIENT CODES AND CIPHERS

The ancient scribes were not just writer-craftsmen putting signs on papyrus, clay, stone or parchment to record simple messages.

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