1. The major glyph types I once defined were the following 71:

There is no systematic order between them and their only function at that stage of my work was to serve as 'boxes' for assembling all the rongorongo glyphs in a way which could later be used for retrieving them easily.

Later I found it necessary for practical reasons to put a name on each one of these 71 'boxes'. The names given were mostly based on what Metoro normally used to say when he saw them, i.e. these 71 glyph types got Polynesian names, for instance manu rere for the first one above.

My curiosity was raised by Metoro's words, because there often seemed to be no easily perceived connection between what he apparently saw and what I saw. Some glyph types were no problem, e.g. tagata (the 5th above) because I saw a man too. Other pictures were not so easy, for instance the glyph type ragi (below tagata). But ragi means (among other things) 'sky' and after having learnt that I could eventually imagine a moon crescent behind a spear (which could be used for locating objects in the night sky):

... I became curious about this star ... called Nuutuittuq [= 'never moves'] ... So, on the lee side of our uquutaq (a snow windbreak) I positioned a harpoon pointing directly at this particular star to see if it would move. In the morning I checked it and discovered that the Tukturjuit (Ursa Major) had changed their position completely but the harpoon still pointed at this star ... I had discovered the stationary star ...  (Abraham Ulayuruluk of Igloolik according to John MacDonald,s  The Arctic Sky. Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend.)

The words Metoro used at each one of all the glyphs he read for Bishop Jaussen is a valuable source of information, but often they do not immediately lead to our goal - to see what the glyph pictures are meant to represent. If we knew what all of these glyph types depicted, then we would have clues to what concepts they were meant to represent, and from there we would have a chance to begin to understand what the texts were about.

Anyhow, by painstakingly comparing texts and by using all my more or less acceptable methods at hand I succeeded in preparing a preliminary glyph type dictionary where all 71 glyph types above are systematically discussed and defined as to their possible basic meanings. On paper this dictionary turned out to be 2,729 pages long or nearly 40 pages per glyph type on average. Such a dictionary is cumbersome to use and I therefore included 71 summary pages.

Clearly there were more glyph types than those 71 which initially had served to classify all the glyphs according to general outlook. Therefore I later began to extend their number as a way to broaden the panorama which my preliminary dictionary had opened up:

71 + 21 = 92 is their current number. The 4th above was earlier classified as a variant of ragi, but there is no moon crescent in the background. Manu rere with an undulating front wing should have another meaning than ordinary manu rere glyphs. Such was for example my way of reasoning.