Decipherment of Rongorongo - de Laat

De Laat

Another decipherment, self-published by Mary de Laat in 2009, covers three texts, A, B, and E. Horley (2010) is a critical review. All three texts are proposed to consist of nothing but extended dialogue. It would be remarkable enough for these rare pieces of wood to record the banal exchanges de Laat attributes to them, yet the ligature 380.1, which de Laat identified as a man named Taea, is found in six of the surviving texts, fully half of the corpus that is indisputably authentic and in good condition, presenting this figure, who is supposed to have murdered his wife, as one of the most important protagonists in the Rapa Nui tradition. Yet there is no such Taea in the surviving Rapa Nui oral literature. This ligature for Taea is the one that was identified by Harrison as a marker for dividing lists, and found by Barthel to have parallels on yet other texts in the forms 380.1.3 and 1.3. However, despite the parallel content of these texts, de Laat's translations of them are quite divergent, because his purely phonetic reading does not allow him to read 1.3 as "Taea". The participants in the dialogues must therefore be different, and de Laat's segmentation of the texts is "unstable". There are also fatal grammatical errors, and readings that turn out to be post-colonial Tahitian loans. In response to such criticism, de Laat has begun to "substantially revise" his translations.