Talk:Rapa Nui language

Language of rongo rongo

Hi. I reverted edition telling

"It is speculated, that the unique (to date undeciphered) Easter Island script called Rongorongo is written in the Rapa Nui language."

because there is no another possible language. If rongo rongo aren't an Rapa nui scripture, they should be an system of scripture. The only inhabitants of Easter Island until 18th century were Polinesians, speakers of Rapa nui language. And is told by missionaires[?] that rongo rongo were used by natives. Bye. --Lin linao 00:22, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

With rongorongo, there are several problems:

• There is no certainty that the scripture in rongorongo tablets is language.
• There is no certainty that the scripture, if it is language, is written in the Rapa Nui language.
• There is no certainty that anyone would have ever been able to "read" the rongorongo tablets. All accounts of such, even from the 19th century, have been proven to be fraudulant.

Also, please remember that the current Rapa Nui language developed in the 19th and 20th centuries when a lot of additional immigrants came from elsewhere in Polynesia to the Easter island. This, together with the collapse of the island's demographics in the mid-19th century, contributed to the disappearance of the rongorongo understanding. --Drieakko 02:26, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the first point, but I don't do it with second one (and I'd never heard about the third). If rongo rongo it was a scripture, by force must be in [classical] Rapa nui language because the island hadn't another inhabitants. Could be made another redaction? I think that my English is so basic for try it. Thanks. Lin linao 13:02, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

If you have a reference that proves the rongorongo scripture to be written in a specific language, please point that out. The third point is valid: all accounts of anyone having been able to read the tablets are proven to be false. That does not mean that they were not meant to be read originally, there is just no proof of that. --Drieakko 01:08, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

No, I mean that there are two options:

a) Rongo rongo is not a scripture

b) Rongo rongo is a scripture

If b), it was created by inhabitants of Easter Island (the wood of tablets belongs to species founded there). Inhabitant of Easter Island were speakers of a Polynesian language: Rapa nui. So, they can't make rongo rongo in another tongue.

I propose a redaction pointing that. I hope you understand my explanation. Bye. Lin linao 11:45, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I understand your point. But like said, it is only a speculation that makers of rongorongo tablets were speaking a Rapa Nui language, since no speaker of Rapa Nui is known to have been able to read the tablets or being able to write any. Also, attempts to find Rapa Nui language specific structures in the tablets have been completely fruitless. --Drieakko 13:41, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

So, we are almost in agree :). However, Easter Island hadn't another inhabitants than Rapa nui people speakers of Rapa nui language. The only manner of the language of tablets (supposing that is a language, of course) be other than Rapa nui is accept an American origin of Hanau Eepe (Long Ears?) and that is almost impossible accords to genetical studies made on islanders. Bye. Lin linao 19:08, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the response. But note that also the claim that all Easter Islanders had always spoken a Rapa Nui kind of language is a speculation. --Drieakko 01:08, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Why?. Lin linao 02:14, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Because there is no evidence on that. It can be speculated, but not proven. It would be the same to say that all people in France have always spoken French (and of that we just know it is not the case). --Drieakko 03:01, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Contradictions

This contradicts

Old Rapa Nui was mostly destroyed in the aftermath of the Peruvian slave deportations in the 1860s. While the majority of the population that was taken to work as slaves in the Peruvian mines died of diseases and bad treatment in the 1860s, hundreds of other Easter Islanders who left for Mangareva in the 1870s and 1880s to work as servants or labourers, adopted the local form of Tahitian-Pidgin, which became the basis for the modern Rapa Nui language when the surviving part of the Mangarevan immigrants returned to their almost deserted home island. quoted material

with this

Father Sebastian Englert,[4] a German missionary living on Easter Island during 1935-1969, published a partial Rapa Nui-Spanish dictionary in his La Tierra de Hotu Matu’a in 1948, trying to save what was left of the old language. Despite the many typographical mistakes, the dictionary is valuable, because it provides a wealth of examples which all appear drawn from a real corpus, part oral traditions and legends, part actual conversations.[5]quoted material

For now I've removed the former from the article. Those two paragraphs contradict each other and make no sense being together. If the first paragraph is true then Sebastian only recorded a hybridized form of Rapa Nui based on Mangarevan. If the second paragraph is true then the first must be false - Rapa Nui maintained their own language under influence from neighbouring Polynesian languages such as Tahitian (which is already verifiable) however the vocabulary, syntax and phonology is largely still Rapa Nui (also verifiable).

I suggest re-writing the first paragraph making it more congruent with the second. Here is my suggestion;

Rapa Nui came under extensive outside influences in the aftermath of the Peruvian slave deportations in the 1860s from neighbouring Polynesian languages such as Tahitian. While the majority of the population that was taken to work as slaves in the Peruvian mines died of diseases and bad treatment in the 1860s, hundreds of other Easter Islanders who left for Mangareva in the 1870s and 1880s to work as servants or labourers, adopted the local form of Tahitian-Pidgin. Fischer argues that this pidgin became the basis for the modern Rapa Nui language when the surviving part of the Rapa Nui immigrants on Mangareva returned to their almost deserted home island. quoted material

However it is far from complete. More information on the influence on vocabulary, phonology and syntax on the language from Tahitian, Spanish and any other language should be placed here. If no one minds, I intend to add it to the page in one weeks time.

121.90.57.12 (talk) 15:19, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

References

Post-Peruvian enslavement?

Please inform who were the "peruvian people" involved in this "business" So far as I Know europeans as spanish people were involved but you are talking about peruvian enslavers?? For your info,even in the Pacific war between Peru and Chile, they invaded Peru deliberately and with the help of British capital and according to his history "they liberated" the slaves of the peruvian haciendas, the truth is that they invaded to conquer territory and win the saltpeter for the UK. It's ridiculous how chile tries to be like the UK, recognized slavery and colonizers worlwide. In Peru, we say Chile is a third world country with imperial ambitions and no idea of the meening of honor .sorry for my english, greetings ! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.8.213.19 (talk) 17:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Materials on Rapa Nui language

Easter Island, the Rapanui speech and the peopling of southeast Polynesia (1912)

https://archive.org/details/cu31924029871013

https://archive.org/details/easterislandrapa00churuoft

Easter Island ; the Rapanui speech and the peopling of southeast Polynesia (1912)

https://archive.org/details/easterislandrapa00chur

https://archive.org/details/easterislandrapa00churrich

Te Pito te Henua, known as Rapa Nui : commonly called Easter Island, South Pacific Ocean. Latitude 2710W. (1899)

https://archive.org/details/tepitotehenuakno00cook

Te Pito te Henua; or, Easter Island (1891)

https://archive.org/details/cu31924105726222

https://archive.org/details/tepitotehenuaor00thomgoog

Mis viajes a Pascua (1921)

https://archive.org/details/misviajespascua00este

Rajmaan (talk) 14:58, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

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Orthography

The orthography section mentions long vowels written with macrons but throughout the page I see circumflexes instead, is there any reason for this? 2WR1 (talk) 20:15, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Arabic script

Was the Rapa Nui language formerly written in Arabic script? Jarble (talk) 15:41, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Glottal stop "unique" among Eastern Polynesian languages? I don't think so...

The article claims:

Uniquely for an Eastern Polynesian language, Rapa Nui has preserved the original glottal stop of Proto-Polynesian.

But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina has a table of languages, including those of islands in Eastern Polynesia such as Hawaii, the Cook Islands, and Tahiti, which include a glottal stop.

Is the claim of uniqueness made in this article simply wrong, as it appears to my naive eyes, or is there a nuance I'm unaware of that somehow makes it true - e.g. are there different kinds of glottal stop such that it can somehow be said that the one in Rapa Nui is the "original" one from Proto-Polynesian and all the others have changed?

(If nobody replies to this after a few weeks, I'll rip out the claim about uniqueness. If somebody does reply to point out a sense in which the claim is actually true, I'll try to clarify the article instead - or else they should do so.) ExplodingCabbage (talk) 10:35, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

No need to clarify. No other E.Poly lang "has preserved the original glottal stop of Proto-Polynesian." If you find an exception, let us know. (I know Hawaiian hasn't, and according to Proto-Polynesian, neither has Tahitian or Samoan.) — kwami (talk) 12:27, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Well, what am I missing, then? The languages I listed descend from Proto-Polynesian and have glottal stops. What makes their glottal stops not "the original glottal stop of Proto-Polynesian"? ExplodingCabbage (talk) 19:11, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, I think I get it - the idea is there's a correspondence between glottal stops in Proto-Polynesian and ones in Rapa Nui, whereas words in Hawaiian et al that are descended from Proto-Polynesian have lost their glottal stops (even as glottal stops have come to be used elsewhere and become a consonant in those languages' alphabets)?

Okay, that makes sense if so, but it is not remotely clear to a non-expert like me that that is what the quoted sentence is supposed to mean. ExplodingCabbage (talk) 19:27, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the key words are "preserved" and "original". Where Proto-Polynesian had glottal stops, only Rapa Nui still has them. Hawaiian preserves proto-Polynesian *k as a glottal stop, but it doesn't preserve the proto-Polynesian glottal stop. Instead, it's innovated a new glottal stop.

It would be like if I said, "of the major Romance languages, only Spanish/Portuguese and Romanian preserve the Latin word for 'head'." That doesn't mean the other languages don't have any word for 'head', only that it's not the Latin word. (This is not an accurate statement, e.g. Italian has capo alongside testa, just an illustration.) — kwami (talk) 19:58, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Okay, this makes sense.

The perspective I was coming at this from: the very existence of the glottal stop as an independent consonant in a language is unfamiliar to me (as a European and a non-linguist), and all these related Polynesian languages have it. Therefore ("surely") it is properly understood as a feature of *Polynesian languages* generally, and if it existed as a consonant in Proto-Polynesian then all the descendant languages that still have a glottal stop consonant can be said to have preserved it.

(Indeed I do find it a bit puzzling how all these related languages have apparently had independent/parallel evolution of new glottal stops while losing the "original" one from Proto-Polynesian...)

I will circle back to this at some point and try to figure out an elegant way to clarify the point in the article; hopefully I can do so such that it will be understandable to someone else like me without also making actual linguists feel it is painfully belabouring the point. ExplodingCabbage (talk) 20:17, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

If you look at the table at proto-Polynesian, you'll see that not all Polynesian languages have a glottal stop. An exception is Maori.

Outside Europe, glottal stop is quite common, but because it's such a weak sound, it's easily lost. That means it must also be easily innovated. London English, for example, developed a glottal stop from t in words like bitten. Standard German has it in words like Oase. But these innovations are completely unrelated to each other, even though both are Germanic languages.

For a broader European equivalent, consider the h sound. That's been lost from Greek, RP English, Maltese and all of the Romance languages. Yet the Mexican Spanish I'm familiar with has an h sound today. Actually, both French and Spanish innovated an h sound in the Middle Ages (not where it was in Latin), then lost it again, only for Mexican Spanish to acquire a new one. So Mexican Spanish has an h at the same time that none of the Romance languages preserve the Latin h. — kwami (talk) 22:45, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

hi,

I fully agree with Kwami's explanations. In parallel, I've added a clarification note to the Rapa Nui entry, as per ExplodingCabbage's suggestion.

best, Womtelo (talk) 23:40, 6 September 2024 (UTC).

Very technical, but at least makes clear that the claim is not an error, and I think a determined non-linguist can make sense of most of it with the provided links. I am struggling to hunt down a definition of "regular reflex", though... ExplodingCabbage (talk) 19:39, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

A "regular reflex" is a predictable sound in a language.

Some words are lost or borrowed, and a few are irregular, but e.g. pPoly *k regularly becomes Hawaiian glottal stop. So if you have a word that was in pPoly, and is now in Hawaiian, and it had a *k in pPoly and now has glottal stop in Hawaiian, then that is a regular reflex. The sound, and also the word if all the other sounds in it are regular reflexes.

There doesn't need to be a change. I think Hawaiian /m/ derives from pPoly *m, so that would also be a regular reflex. — kwami (talk) 21:53, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

The word "reflex" is defined in Linguistic reconstruction. Double sharp (talk) 02:53, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Tangentially-related to the whole rest of the discussion here, I note that besides a couple of sentences in the final paragraph, none of the History section has citations, including the claim we're discussing here about glottal stops. Adding a supporting citation would be good if you know of one! ExplodingCabbage (talk) 19:43, 7 September 2024 (UTC)