Re: Lost in the mists of time...
From: M. Ranjit Mathews (ranjit_mathews_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/18/04
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Date: 18 Jun 2004 01:43:52 -0700
adda1234@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote ...
> ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com (M. Ranjit Mathews) wrote ...
> > adda1234@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote ...
> > > The Sumerian and Egyptian writing was merely hieroglyphics, with zero
> > > phonetics. Only pictorial representation of objects and ideas.
> > how do you
> > suppose Royal mummies' names were deciphered? Tutankhamen wasn't a
> > known king; how is his name known? For a start, give this a once-over;
> > if so inclined, go on and bone up on Champollion's decipherment of the
> > Rosetta stone.
> > http://www.jimloy.com/hiero/alpha.htm
>
> So did he also have a taperecorder set at 2000 BC to find the exact
> quality of the sounds involved.
Champollion deduced that there were sounds associated with hieroglyphs
and that the language of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta
stone was an ancestor of Coptic; ...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/decipherment_04.shtml
... no one said Champollion knew the exact sounds of ancient Egyptian.
If a script was phonetic, it doesn't follow that its decipherer knows
its sounds as well as the original users of the script knew them
(refer to the analogous example below, of a hypothetical decipherment
of ancient Greek). Champollion deciphered Egyptian by virtue of his
knowledge of Coptic and presumably based his transcription to Roman
script on the basis of the pronunciation of Coptic.
Hypothetically assume that the Greek script became extinct ages ago
and Greek is now written in (an adaptation of) Kyoto-Harvard notation
used for transliterating Indian languages to ASCII. Then, one who
deciphers the Greek script based on modern Greek pronunciation might
transcribe bion as <Vion>, Crete as <KrItI> and Olympia as <Olympia>.
One who pronounces ancient Greek in accordance with such a
transcription would inevitably pronounce it differently from ancient
Greeks; one would tend to pronounce the b's as <V>s, the <E>s as <Is>,
and would have a pitchless intonation. It wouldn't be pronounced
identically with modern Greek either; one would pronounce the
transcribed Olympia as <olympia> whereas modern Greeks pronounce it
<olybia>
> or is not the whole thing one huge exercise in motivated guesswork?
> You simply assign whatever meaning you like to what every hieroglyphic,
> upon the basis of "divine inspiration" or what?
Certainly not. For an overview of the subject, including an
introduction to cryptanalytic cracking of ciphers and scripts, refer
to the following books by Cyrus Herzl Gordon:
Forgotten scripts: The story of their decipherment (Pelican books)
Praise for Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Decipherment
> :) :) The presence of the Rosetta stone is
> handy, no doubt, but I doubt if much could be inferred from just the
> few words there, with corresponding hieroglyphics.
If deciphering an unknown script and translating a passage in an
unidentified language is not inferring much, that is. That leads us to
the question of what would consititute inferring much. What more would
Champollion need to have accomplished in order to have "inferred
much"?
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