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The Rongorongo of Easter Island

General Index of www.rongorongo.org

OVERVIEW

www.rongorongo.org has become large, so large that visitors may never chance upon a particular page which would have interested them. Implementing a search facility is beyond the ken of this webmaster. But creating an index is easy.

In a first stage a list was produced of all the words on all the pages which constitute this site, and an index was produced comprising only words occurring 20 times or less. This index was unsatisfactory, as it lacked high-frequency names such as Thomson, Barthel, and Makemake. So words starting with a capital letter had to be allowed in, however many times they occurred. The resulting list had to be pruned by hand, for instance to remove high-frequency words starting a sentence, such as There.

As a single page, this index would have been far too large (about 3 megabytes) and it had to be split. Originally, it was split into 26 files, one for each initial letter. Even so, some files proved far too large. The file for the letter S, for instance, was more than 300 kilobytes long.

So eventually the index was split into a number of small "volumes", each 32 kilobytes or less. Click on Index map to access it.

USAGE

Here is the index entry for the word ahu: Clicking on the word ahu itself will take you to the top of the page.
The number in parentheses (16) is the number of times that the word ahu can be found on the pages of wwww.rongorongo.org. It is followed by links to the pages where it occurs.

WARNING Clicking on those links will open a new window. Admittedly, this is against recommended practice. However, there was no clean alternative. If the linked page does not open in a new window, you have to use the back button to return to the index, which is also against recommended practice. One solution would be to provide a back link to the index. However:

  1. www.rongorongo.org currently consists of some 800 pages, each of which would have to be modified to include a link back to the index. This can easily be done by writing a short program ad hoc. But all these pages would have to be uploaded again onto the host.
  2. the link to Index would take you back to this page, not to the alphabetical or volume page from where you started.

Nota Bene. The index was produced automatically by a program written for the purpose and it was also split automatically into its 95 subfiles. It would have been desirable to edit these manually, and this was actually attempted, but proved far too time-consuming. The index covers all the pages of www.rongorongo.org as of 25 December 2002, except:

  1. the Rapanui-English dictionary
  2. the works of Eugène Eyraud and of Alphonse Pinart, in French.
It includes Sebastian Englert's legends ("leyendas") and so contains quite a number of Rapanui words.
 
 

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