Editing Rongorongo (section)

===Glyphs===
The only published reference to the glyphs which is even close to comprehensive remains Barthel (1958). Barthel assigned a three-digit numeric code to each glyph or to each group of similar-looking glyphs that he believed to be [[allograph]]s (variants). In the case of allography, the bare numeric code was assigned to what Barthel believed to be the basic form (''Grundtypus''), while variants were specified by alphabetic suffixes. Altogether he assigned 600 numeric codes. The hundreds place is a digit from 0 to 7, and categorizes the head, or overall form if there is no head: 0 and 1 for geometric shapes and inanimate objects; 2 for figures with "ears"; 3 and 4 for figures with open mouths (they are differentiated by their legs/tails); 5 for figures with miscellaneous heads; 6 for figures with beaks; and 7 for fish, arthropods, etc. The digits in tens and units places were allocated similarly, so that, for example, glyphs 206, 306, 406, 506, and 606 all have a downward-pointing wing or arm on the left, and a raised four-fingered hand on the right:

[[Image:Barthel code.png|upright=2|thumb|center|Coding: The first digit distinguishes head and basic body shape, and the six in the units place indicates a specific raised hand.]]

There is some arbitrariness to which glyphs are grouped together, and there are inconsistencies in the assignments of numerical codes and the use of affixes which make the system rather complex.{{refn|{{cite web|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080209110722/http://www.rongorongo.org/corpus/codes.html|archive-date=2008-02-09|url=http://www.rongorongo.org/corpus/codes.html
|title=R<small>ONGORONGO</small>: Transliteration Codes|publisher=www.rongorongo.org|access-date=2008-06-09}}|group="note"}} However, despite its shortcomings, Barthel's is the only effective system ever proposed to categorize rongorongo glyphs.<ref>Pozdniakov 1996:294</ref>

Barthel (1971) claimed to have parsed the corpus of glyphs to 120, of which the other 480 in his inventory are allographs or [[Typographical ligature|ligatures]].{{refn|55 glyphs would be required for a pure syllabary, assuming that long vowels were ignored or treated as vowel sequences.<ref>Macri 1995; see also [[Rapanui language]]</ref>|group="note"|name=syllable}} The evidence was never published, but similar counts have been obtained by other scholars, such as [[Konstantin Pozdniakov|Pozdniakov]] & Pozdniakov (2007).