Alphabetical Read Free Page B

how language, letters and alphabets can be the subject of rivalries, wars and plunder, the Rosetta Stone does it all.
    The British and French invaders of Egypt in the early nineteenth century fought over the stone. Today, people still argue over which of the European scholars who pored over its three languages first cracked the code of the hieroglyphs. The Frenchman Jean-François Champollion is usually given more credit than the Englishman Thomas Young, though Champollion himself gave Young some credit. This overlooks the fact that Ahmad Bakr ibn Wahshiyah, who lived in Egypt in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, wrote a treatise on hieroglyphics, pointing out that the glyphs were both pictorial images and single symbols signifying sounds.
    How the international use of letters works across time and place can be seen in the thread of scholarship which links ibn Wahshiyah to Champollion: there was first an Arabic manuscript of the book Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham in which ibn Wahshiyah deciphered a number of Egyptian hieroglyphs; there was then a translation of the Arabic manuscript in a book published in English in 1806 by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall as Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained, with an Account of the Egyptian Priests, their Classes, Initiation, and Sacrifices in the Arabic Language by Ahmad Bin Abubekr Bin Wahishih ; someone called Silvestre de Sacy – a colleague of Champollion – read this English version of the Arab manuscript; sixteen years later, Champollion’s complete decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared. There is, then, the strong possibility that an Arab scholar and expert on magic, statues, agriculture, alchemy, physics and medicine, writing at the same time that King Alfred was trying to get people to read English, may have played a significant part inunlocking the crucial fact that hieroglyphs were not only pictures but that some of them also represented specific sounds. To grasp how this works, the Egyptians some four thousand years ago did the equivalent of changing a picture of an apple from representing the word we say as ‘apple’, to representing the sound ‘a’, changing our picture of a ball representing the word we say as ‘ball’, to representing the sound ‘b’ and so on.
    What we don’t know for certain is whether the ancient Egyptians were the first to do this, nor whether they passed it on to others. In other words, we cannot be sure that the ancient Egyptian writing is an ancestor of what you’re reading now. Around the same time, other peoples living relatively near to the Egyptians were developing scripts that also used phonetic principles – but in different ways. For example, the ancient Sumerians, from what is now present-day Iraq, developed a way of using symbols to represent syllables. An analogy would be if we had a symbol for a bird’s beak or ‘bill’ based on a picture of a bird’s bill. This ‘bill’ symbol could be used again and again in a word like ‘building’ (where our ‘buil-’ sounds the same as ‘bill’), or in ‘possible’ (where our ‘-ble’ sounds like ‘bill’). Another way to imagine the ‘syllabic principle’ is to think of the possibility of us using the ampersand, ‘&’, to write ‘hand’ as ‘h&’.
    What has just taken me a few minutes to describe would have taken people hundreds of years to evolve. Though these breakthroughs lie at the heart of our culture, we can only speculate why people tried to make them. In terms of trade, pictograms are an easier way to translate words because you don’t have to use abstract symbols like ‘h’ or ‘y’ representing sounds in different languages. The pictogram for ‘eye’ will work for my word for ‘eye’ just as well as for your word for ‘eye’, each of which may well sound completely