Easter Island, the Key to South America

FATHER SEBASTIAN ENGLERT –

WILLIAM MULLOY, TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR –

ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, NEW LIGHT ON EASTER ISLAND –

1965–1970

This book both confirms and give the lie to Jared Diamond’s Collapse. But many other questions than the “collapse” of this island can be aired in clear-cut words and phrases.

The first question is: Who are these Easter Islanders? No one can answer really. I have collected in this text the few elements that can lead to an answer, at least a hypothesis. They had a writing system of a special type. It was not phonetical because it counted something like eight hundred discrete elements. Too numerous for them to represent individual sounds. It is not an alphabet. It is also surprising for a purely syllabic writing system at least of the standard type of Consonant-Vowel or Vowel-Consonant: five vowels and twenty consonants only give one hundred CV and one hundred VC syllables. If you extend this simple syllabic structure to VCV you get five hundred more syllables and the extension CVC…