Trying to decipher what Metoro meant with his words leads me to try to 'refine', at some places, the text from Barthel / Jaussen. Also new insights sometimes appear which makes me redistribute the words. The results of this process are documented in the 3rd row above. My ideas about what the glyphs might show and mean of course then influences me. Example: The word hoea exists and means 'instrument for tattooing' according to Barthel. But my imagination tells me that we here see an open shell and that therefore a more reasonable reading is te ho ea, as ho may mean to deliver, to give up and ea means to rise, go out. This is a way of reading the text that tries to make a pattern in what Metoro said, talking it seems about greeting the arriving sun. So I changed te hoea into te ho ea. However, I have thought twice and now I have changed back to the original hoea. Metoro did say this and not ho ea. That I am convinced of after comparative readings involving both viri (GD33) and hoea (GD43). His logic seems lacking, though, as hoea belongs to autumn equinox. Didn't he see this glyph clearly, mistaking it for hoea? No, his logic is crystal clear. That I now understand, I have thought thrice (there are weeks between different such rethinkings). Because hoea (GD43) has different variants. One indeed stands for autumn equinox, but that one has a simplified solar head hanging like when a flower has been frostbitten. Another variant of GD43 - without that hanging 'head' - stands for 'the season when sun will receed' and that season starts at summer solstice. Therefore Metoro said the right words, though not 'translating' GD33 as viri (as summer stolstice). But perhaps he said viri and Jaussen then chose to write down hoea which he also may have said at this glyph. Metoro said so many words that Jaussen had to make choices about what to show for the rest of the world. "Jaussen never presented the coherent Rapanui text of Metoro's chant, because, he says... 'the words added in the chant would have given it an expanse of more than two hundred pages, the reading of which would not have been bearable.' Instead, Jaussen himself tried, line by line, to separate the rongorongo signs in such a manner that their number in each line corresponded to the number of words chanted by Metoro." (Heyerdahl 4) In the 4th row above I will try to translate Metoro's words into English. In the 5th row a translation of the rongorongo text into English is planned. |
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