hua	fruit, offspring, testicles, return
mata	eye, face, raw, drop of water
rima	fingers, hand, forearm, 5

Though already such a simple system reveals the great gap between the frames of reference, where each Polynesian word corresponds to several English ones which only with some mental effort can be accepted to have anything in common. But the offspring is like the return of the parent, a drop of water has the form of a little eye, and 5 is the number of fingers on a hand.

However, a Polynesian-English dictionary based on the words used by Metoro Tauga Ure for the signs (cfr in the Introduction) is not enough to enable us to reach the meaning behind the rongorongo texts. Instead of working with words we probably have to work with numbers, such is the conclusion we ought to draw from our preliminary studies of the G text - the positions of the stars relative to each other cannot be described properly without counting.

The rongorongo texts were 'sacred' (tapu) in the ancient meaning but they could be made harmless (turned around, noa) by the female touch:

... At the end of June 1869 Bishop Jaussen on Tahiti received a gift from the inhabitants on Easter Island, in gratitude for having received the new faith from the missionaries. The gift was the rongorongo tablet now know as Tablette Échancrée, the first rongorongo tablet known outside of Easter Island. It was an important event, because it made Bishop Jaussen search for more such tablets, it set the ball rolling.

The tablet in question was wrapped in a 16 meter long thread of braided human hair. I have reason to belive it was female hair, and I perceive the enwrapment to be a sign: The tablet had been made harmless by being enveloped (trapped) in female hair. Female hair is especially potent in neutralizing such powerful mana charges as those embodied in rongorongo tablets. The Bishop was protected.

Hair grows predominantly at the back of the head, at the opposite side of the face (which is in front). When you go forward you face what lies ahead, while the back of your head, covered with hair, cannot see anything. Eyes are in front, hair at the back. The hairy back side is female in character and the front side with eyes is male ...

My explanation originated from considering the following:

"Balancing the notion of tapu, though not in perfect dichotomy, is the notion of noa. This pertains to mundane, ordinary objects and functions - household and serving utensils, the acts of preparing and eating food, the many small and common interactions of everyday life. 

Noa is safe - without preternatural sanction or restricted association, it is demonstrated by the lifting of the condition of tapu from a particular environment or object. A newly built house, ornamented and fresh, would be considered tapu - unsafe, prohibited, raw with spirit and inaccessible to the common touch of people. Making the place noa - 'blessing' it in current terms - would involve ritual, and the crossing of the threshold, usually by a high-born woman.  

Her special form of tapu would counter the energies within the house, and thus render it noa, and safe for general entry. Such ritual continues to be observed today; even in the context of an ethnological or fine arts exhibition, these procedures are followed, to appease the ancestral forces who may generate tapu, which imbues the objects with dread or beauty." (D. C. Starzecka, Maori Art and Culture.)

Another description of the nature of 'sacred' is given in the introductory chapter to Hamlet's Mill:

"In our age of print one is tempted to dismiss these as religious excursions into homileties, but originally they represented a great concentration of attention on material which had been distilled for relevancy through a long period of time and which was considered worthy of being committed to memory generation after generation.

The tradition of Celtic Druidism was delivered not only in songs, but also in tree-lore which was much like a code. And in the East, out of complicated games based on astronomy, there developed a kind of shorthand which became the alphabet.

As we follow the clues - stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures - a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it.

This is a true edifice, something like a mathematical matrix, a World-Image that fits the many levels, and all of it kept in order by strict measure. It is measure that provides the countercheck, for there is much that can be identified and redisposed from rules like the old Chinese saying about the pitch pipes and the calendar. ['The calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them.'] When we speak of measures, it is always some form of Time that provides them, starting from two basic ones, the solar year and the octave, and going down from there in many periods and intervals, to actual weights and sizes.

What modern man attempted in the merely conventional metric system has archaic precedents of great complexity. Down the centuries there comes an echo of Al-Biruni's wondering a thousand years ago, when that prince of scientists discovered that the Indians, by then miserable astronomers, calculated aspects and events by means of stars - and were not able to show him any one star that he asked for. Stars had become items for them, as they were to become again for Leverrier and Adams, who never troubled to look at Neptune in their life although they had computed and discovered it in 1847.

The Mayas and the Aztecs in their unending calculations seem to have had similar attitudes. The connections were what counted. Ultimately so it was in the archaic universe, where all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly. And Number dominated them all ..."