A fascinating historical example of the difficulty of translating one language to another is the story of how linguists decoded the famous Rosetta Stone, an ancient stone featuring identical text written in Ancient Greek and two types of Ancient Egyptian script, most notably the Egyptian heiroglyphic script. For hundred of years before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the late 1700s, linguists had been trying to decode Egyptian heiroglyphics (the script resembling eyes, birds, human figures and cat heads). The Rosetta Stone featured identical text written in Ancient Greek, which the linguists could interpret, and Ancient Egyptian, which they could not. Linguists mistakenly believed the Egyptian hieroglyphics represented ideas, like pictographs similar to Japanese kanji. However, a brilliant French linguist surmised, correctly, that the hieroglyphics were phonetic symbols more akin to Japanese hiragana, or our alphabet. This was a tremendous breakthrough for linguists who, by identifying commonly-known names in the Greek, were, able to find the same names in corresponding symbols in the Egyptisn script. From that, linguists were able to begin deciphering the previously incomprehensible language.
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