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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() An approximataion of "The Why Files" rendered in coptic characters |
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. Learning to read As any first-grader can tell you, making sense of writing can be a bear.
Hyvää huomenta. Hauska tavata! Minä osaan suomea.
You would probably try to decipher the dead language by working backward, moving from the known to the unknown. That's what language specialists did during the long effort to decipher ancient Egyptian. Ancient Egyptian evolved through five distinct stages during more than 3,000 years of existence. The last stage -- Coptic -- began around 300 AD, when Egyptians converted to Christianity, and hieroglyphics -- a form of writing devoted mainly to religious purposes -- was banned. When, toward the end of the first millennium, Egypt began speaking Arabic, hieroglyphics and related scripts finally left the living stage, obscuring the long history of Egyptian culture and accomplishment.
Super stone
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Then, in 1799, a stone was discovered in Rosetta, Egypt, that carried versions of a single text in hieroglyphic, a cursive derivative of hieroglyphic called hieratic, and ancient Greek.
Since ancient Greek was already understood, the arrival of the "Rosetta stone" at the British Museum in 1802 jump-
Since then, Egyptologists have recognized a series of ancient Egyptian writing systems. Hieroglyphics was a pictorial script that was generally carved in stone for religious or ceremonial purposes. The easier-
All that's very fine. But how do you know you've deciphered a dead language correctly? "Internal consistency is the main thing," says Egyptologist John Baines. Do a group of deciphered inscriptions make sense, or are they self-contradictory? Do names borrowed from other languages translate correctly? Do the dates and facts line up with evidence from other archeological sources?
Näkemiin (Good Bye). We're almost Finnished. But how did writing change society? | |
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