The primary purpose of digitizing those texts is to produce a concordance. From this concordance a grammar of the ancient language can then be produced and Englert's diccionario del antiguo idioma ("Dictionary of the Ancient Language") can be improved.

Currently, the only good grammar of the Rapa Nui language is Veronica Du Feu's "Rapanui: A Descriptive Grammar" (ISBN: 0-415000114), but its availability (almost nil) and its price ($280 new) amount to a denial of knowledge.

At first, in the absence of a sufficient knowledge of the Rapa Nui language, it was necessary to rely mostly on Englert's Spanish translation. Then, gradually, a growing familiarity with Rapa Nui led to rely more and more on the original texts, and, since the ultimate purpose was to produce a grammar and a tutorial of the old language, the translations became closer and closer to the text. The first legends were fairly close translations of Englert's Spanish rendition of the original Rapa Nui. Then, occasional discrepancies were observed between the Rapa Nui and its Spanish translation. These discrepancies are most certainly typesetting mistakes and editorial oversights, such as when an entire Rapa-Nui sentence is missing in the Spanish translation, or a Spanish sentence has no counterpart in the Rapa Nui text.

So it became necessary to insert explanatory notes. These notes are interspersed with Englert's own notes, only distinguished by an alphabetical suffix. Thus, the translator's notes occurring between Englert's notes 113 and 114 are numbered 113a, 113b, 113c, and so on. Clicking on the superscripted note (e.g. ^27a) in the body of the English text takes you to the note at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the note again (e.g. "Note 27a") takes you back to where you left the text.

Go to The Legends.