Rapanui

Als ein Ergebnis der Kolonialzeit wird die Weltsprache Spanisch heute nicht nur in Europa und den Amerikas, sondern auch in Asien und Ozeanien gesprochen. Dieser Band erschliesst der Linguistik die asiatisch-ozeanische Hispanophonie erstmals als sprachliches Areal. In den Blick genommen werden die drei wichtigsten Sprach- und gleichzeitig Kontaktraeume des Spanischen in Asien und Ozeanien: die Marianen, die Osterinsel und die Philippinen. Die hier gesprochenen lokalen Varietaeten des Spanischen wie auch die autochthonen Sprachen (Chamoru, Rapanui, Cebuano und Chabacano) werden linguistisch mehrdimensional - strukturell, soziohistorisch und kontakttheoretisch - untersucht. Dabei wird der Frage nachgegangen, in welcher Hinsicht die Varietaeten des Spanischen in Asien und Ozeanien ein separates sprachliches Areal darstellen und welche Bedeutung dem Sprachkontakt zukommt.

The author of the article observed the special position and the role of the metaphore south while editing Uku Masing’s “Poetry I–VI” (Tartu: Ilmamaa, 2000–2005). The metaphore south contains something substantially linking with Masing’s  confession of faith and truth. In short, the
south-metaphore acts as a poetic equivalent of the principle of ‘love’ in Masing’s mentality. In case of an isolated poem it can be easily missed,
but is readily noticeable when reading the whole collection of poems.
The article thus treats the connection between the figurative semantics of Uku Masing’s poetry and his understandings on religious philosophy through the south-metaphore. The south-metaphore refers also to Masing’s mythological world view. The south is directly linked with the place and being in Masing’s poetry. Masing creates the environment of being with the language.

The recitations of the Easter Island native Ure Vaeiko that were recorded in 1886 belong to the very small corpus of traditional Rapanui literature that has been preserved. Although the value of individual texts is disputed, the chants that were published as Atua Matariri, Eaha to Ran Ariiki Kete and Apai are generally considered to be genuine examples of so-called “Old Rapanui”. Of these three, the Apai text is by far the most enigmatic, as it has been recorded and published in a way that renders it virtually incomprehensible. The accompanying attempt at translation is a confused narrative that appears to have only a fragmentary relation to the chant. This paper presents a tentative reconstruction of the original Apai text, together with a new translation. It is proposed that Apai contains an origin myth which intends to explain certain celestial phenomena regarding the sun and the planet Venus, set against the familiar Polynesian background of the eternal struggle between the brother gods Tangaroa and Tane. As such, it could provide valuable information on pre-missionary Easter Island astronomy, mythology, and literature.

Popova, T., 2018. The Rapanui String Figure "Amo Moenga Roa": On a Teacher's Rongorongo "Stone Book". Polynesia Newsletter, 14, pp. 2-6.


Keywords:  writing, rongorongo, folklore, string figure, string game, Rapanui, Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Polynesia

ABSTRACT
In light of the United States' 2011 declaration of an economic and military policy refocus-ing on the Asia-Pacific region, Kuan-Hsing Chen's argument for Asia as method can be expanded in Asian American critique to consider Asia and the Pacific as method. A critical analysis of Asian American settler colonialism in Hawai‘l
and in the United States constitutes one such methodology that mobilizes a mode of self-reflexive inquiry in Asian American critique and conjoins it to a decolonizing and deimperializing movement in Asia and the Pacific, underscoring the need for Asian American settlers to challenge the US settler state and its assault on indigenous peoples and to enact a future beyond empires. On a global scale, US settler colonialism and its seizures of indigenous lands enable and are enabled by US imperialist practices in Asia and the Pacific. The Moana Nui 2011 conference in Honolulu countered the militarized capitalism of empires represented by APEC and the TPP, illustrating the ways that peoples of Asia and the Pacific can build on each other's struggles and enact economies that will sustain us beyond empires, economies premised not on the production of scarcity that drives capitalism but on the restoration of abundance.

Rjabchikov, Sergei V., 2018. The Portrait of a Next Glyphbreaker: Albert Davletshin. Polynesia Newsletter, 14, pp. 7-11.

Keywords:  writing, rongorongo, folklore, rock art, string figure, string game, Rapanui, Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Polynesia, Maya, Proto-Polynesian, PPN

The linguistic ecology of Easter Island (or Rapa Nui) has experienced enormous changes since the mid 19th century. Colonial actions led to the replacement of the indigenous Eastern Polynesian language Rapanui by a Polynesian-European hybrid, and the massive migration of Chileans from the 1960s onward made Spanish the dominant language on the island. Today, modern Rapanui and Spanish on Easter Island are best understood as dynamic speech continua in an ecology that exhibits an advanced drift towards the Spanish pole. However, strategies can be found, that are promising with regard to the maintenance of the indigenous language, if in an altered form.

La ecología lingüística de la Isla de Pascua (o Rapa Nui) ha vivido cambios enormes desde mediados del siglo xix. Las diversas acciones coloniales sobre la isla llevaron a la sustitución de la lengua indígena polinesia oriental, el rapanui, por un híbrido polinesio-europeo, y la migración masiva procedente de Chile desde los años 60 del siglo pasado hizo del español la lengua dominante en la isla. Hoy en día, el rapanui moderno y el español se entienden mejor en Isla de Pascua como continuos de habla dinámicos en una ecología, que exhibe una tendencia avanzada hacia el polo español. Sin embargo, se pueden encontrar estrategias prometedoras en la comunidad rapanui en lo concerniente al mantenimiento del idioma indígena, si bien en una forma modificada.

The participation of rapanui soldiers in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) is part of the contemporary oral traditions in Easter Island. However, this is a subject that has not been clarified by the available historiographic works. This article is a preliminary study that tries to solve partially this issue through the use of both, primary and secondary sources waiting for a more exhaustive work in the archives. The article goes in-depth in the relationship between the rapanui people and the republics of Chile and Perú before the war. The presence of rapanui soldiers in this conflict is not confirmed but is highly plausible as can be inferred from the sources. An analysis of the participation in the army of the three rapanui soldiers mentioned in these traditions, Juan Tepano, Juan Araki, and José Pirivato, is included too. For this, the version of the official recognitions by the Chilean Army and the Island traditions is compared to the information obtained by the Department of Military History of Chile in a 2006 study.

Resumen:
La participación de soldados rapanui en la Guerra del Pacífico (1879-1883) forma parte de la tradición oral contemporánea en Isla de Pascua. Sin embargo, ésta es una temática que no ha sido aclarada por la historiografía disponible. Este artículo es un estudio preliminar que busca resolver en parte este enigma consultando tanto fuentes primarias, de época, como fuentes secundarias, a la espera de trabajo más exhaustivo en archivos. El artículo ahonda en la relación del pueblo rapanui con las repúblicas de Chile y Perú antes de la Guerra. La presencia de soldados rapanui en dicho conflicto, si bien no se puede confirmar aún, es altamente plausible como se puede inferir de las fuentes consultadas. También se incluye un análisis de la participación en el ejército de los tres soldados rapanui mencionados en las tradiciones actuales: Juan Tepano, Juan Araki y José Pirivato. Para esto se contrapone la versión de los reconocimientos oficiales del ejército chileno y la tradición de la Isla con la información recopilada por el Departamento de Historia Militar en un estudio del año 2006.

The Rules of Animal and Human Populations establishes and explores a theory that there are distinct and predictable patterns of dispersal in all species, including humans and that, in human societies, these patterns affect the size of populations and the nature of economies and political systems. It looks at the rules common to traditional societies bound to particular localities, contrasting them broadly with modern settler states which have abstract concepts of membership and huge populations largely unrooted to locality and land.

The book begins by describing the social costs of infrastructure expansion and population growth in economic growth systems in some modern societies. After reviewing population theories, it introduces a new theory of an additional function of genetic diversity in two chapters that look at impacts on fertility opportunities of the Westermarck Effect and incest avoidance in non-human species. A final chapter compares these with kinship restrictions and non-sale of land in Pacific Islander and other traditional social systems. We learn that modern societies ignore these traditions at their peril and that Anglophone systems with rapidly growing populations a seeming norm are quite different from those of continental Europe, where population growth is slowing. We come to understand that our destinies and societies are still very dependent on who we are, whom we marry, how far away we live from our parents and whether we inherit, buy or rent, plus the transport we use.
Most economic demographic theory begins with the industrial revolution as its norm, ignoring the exceptionality and relative transience of this period and treating other species and the natural environment as ‘externals’. Although informed by ‘collapse’ theory (Tainter) Newman is interested in what keeps some societies going for thousands of years. She finds that stable populations are not limited to hunter gatherer communities. Newman’s completely new take on the 'riddle' of Easter Island which will surprise everyone.

In all human societies, textiles play important roles in social, economic, and religious life. As in other Polynesian societies, on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the second half of the 19 th century, textiles were important locally and served, above all, as objects of exchange with foreign visitors. This article examines cultural transformations that occurred on Rapa Nui, as reflected in the use and signification of textiles, particularly in the use of introduced cloth and clothing during the times of the first missions and the first colonial agents. Our analysis is based on information taken from missionary writings and from the reports of travelers and explorers who visited the island during that period. Understanding that material culture cannot be separated from the cultural practices in which it is embedded, our analysis will focus on accounts referring to material objects as elements that reflect the social and cultural transformations of the historic context in which they were created. We argue that the islanders redefined Western textiles that were introduced, using them in ritual contexts appropriate to the island's culture. European textiles acted as status markers within a new social organization, and also served as sociopolitical markers among island groups (Christian converts and non-converts).

After recognizing fundamental errors in my first approach to find a key to read the Rongorongo tablets by means of quantitative analytics, this is the second approach which uses the mathematical and statistical properties of the language and the writing system for this purpose. If the first, naive attempt to assign every sign of Rongorongo to syllables of Rapanui yielded only few results, the approach presented here is much more promising. Instead of assuming a purely syllabic script, the ratio of syllable signs to logograms was estimated using the Modified Power Law (MPL). Contrary to the claim that Rongorongo is not a real writing system and therefore undecipherable, subsequent examination of the quantitative properties of the texts compared to the quantitative properties of the isolating Polynesian language Rapanui suggests that Rongorongo is a complete syllabic-logographic writing system.

While not much has been changed to the algorithm for the quantitative assignment of statistical properties of signs to sets of syllables, the separate examination of each tablet has produced new insights. So we find different sets of signs used in the texts of each tablet, but a core set of 80 signs used with similar frequency in each examined tablet. This suggests that different authors may have been involved in the writing of the texts, maybe at different times, but the complete inventory of Rongorongo signs was not used by every author. However, everyone was familiar with the basic subset of probably predominantly syllable signs, that is, they had a common essential writing system.

After correcting the errors of the first approach while maintaining the basic principles, there was a good agreement between the mathematical properties of this unique Polynesian writing system and the Rapanui language on which it is based. The statistics of language and writing could be correlated quantitatively, but ambiguities in the assignment of syllables to signs could not completely be resolved. The attempt at deciphering has been made from various points of attack, which are reflected in subsets with defined properties of writing and language. The quantitative method included counting, selecting, sorting, assigning, etc. This resulted in different readings with different probabilities for the signs in Easter Island script. Only the two most probable readings of a sign were used to transcribe the texts of the tablets. The number of resulting different readings is still very large. As an example, all variants of the most probable readings of the beginnings of the texts were generated recursively.

These readings, which are still incomprehensible, were subjected to an experiment: online translation programs were used to test which languages actually deliver readable, if not necessarily meaningful translations. They were mostly languages of the Polynesian language family. This is in line with the expectations. However, this could also be an artifact, since ultimately the statistical properties of Rapanui were mapped onto the statistics of the Rongorongo signs. In the worst case, the results would only be a kind of Markov chain.

On the other hand, if it is a kind of transcript of the tablet texts, which is pointing in the right direction, then from now on the help of native speakers of Rapanui and insiders of the cultural tradition of Rapa Nui as well as linguists is essential/indispensable! Collaboration with experts on the history and mythology of Rapa Nui and native speakers of the Easter Island language Rapanui is imperative and necessary before any further significant progress can be made in correctly reading the Kohau Rongorongo.

That it is at all possible to map statistical and structural properties of Rapanui to the Rongorongo texts is an encouraging indication. However, the following critical questions must be answered first:

• Is the Rapanui database used here useful?
• Are there passages in the transcripts that make any sense?
• Does the text or the rhythm of the prose remind one of old Polynesian or even Rapa Nui stories, songs, poems or prayers?

If there are no further approaches for the application of the formal, quantitative method used here, then an extended examination of the signs and a comparison with their descriptions and interpretations is necessary.

In particular, the core signs should be given a special attention. In a further investigation, the question should therefore be answered as to whether the core set of signs is also used in other tablets.

Another hypothesis is, whether parts of the signs already carry meaning. However, this requires a new way of describing the signs. So far, the systematic list of Barthel's numbers has been used. However, Metoro's readings of the tablets come into consideration (Barthel [3]), as well as his statements on the "names" or meanings of the signs. The work by Werner Wolff [11] provides a well-founded supplement, even if Wolff initially assumes a purely logographic script, but later also suspects syllabic signs as well. In a first step, the different decipherments should be compared with Metoro's descriptions of the signs. The next step might be a detailled examination of the signs itself. The linguistic work of Albert Davletshin [12] could be used in a further step.

This research is currently in progress.


Note: The main text of this document is written in German.