Comparison between Rongorongo and the syllable sequence of ancient chants from the Easter Island

Authors: Fumihiko Yamaguchi

Research in Computing Science, Vol. 70, pp. 9-18, 2013.

Abstract: Rongorongo is sequence of symbols engraved on the surface of wooden artifacts made in the Easter Island. Rongorongo is considered to be script, but has not yet been deciphered. As Rongorongo is assumed to be the record of chant, we syntactically compare Rongorongo with chants in the Easter Island. A simple exhaustive search method is applied to find correspondence between the order of symbols in Rongorongo and that of syllables in the chants. However, the correct correspondence is unknown. Therefore, the proposed method is adapted to a similar problem of matching kanji-hiragana mixed text with katakana text in order to characterize the method. After confirming that the method produces higher precision when there are more kind of frequent symbols. As a result, some correspondences are found, whereas no correspondence is found in most pairs of Rongorongo lines and verses of the chants.

PDF: Comparison between Rongorongo and the syllable sequence of ancient chants from the Easter Island
PDF: Comparison between Rongorongo and the syllable sequence of ancient chants from the Easter Island