Christine's Hello Column

APRIL 2006

Hello!

I recently read that half of the 3,000 languages now spoken are in danger of extinction. It has happened many times in history that a language has gradually faded out of existence. Sometimes, all the speakers were killed in a disaster. Other times, a local or old language may be overpowered by a metropolitan one or a new one and pressure is applied by authorities to neglect the ancestral tongue in favour of a more widely spoken one.

Children may be forbidden to use their mother tongue in the classroom, as happened with the Welsh, Irish and Aboriginal Australians.

When this happens, it’s a tragedy, not only for the speakers, separated from their native language, but also for the world. Every culture has much to offer other cultures, and both the spoken and written history, lifestyle and literature of each culture contains rich lessons for others.

When Egypt became Christianised, hieroglyphics were considered pagan and were strongly discouraged. After a time, they were no longer studied at all. The last hieroglyphic writings were made about 394 AD.

For almost 1500 years, nobody could read the hieroglyphic inscriptions on ancient tombs. Then in 1799, a French soldier discovered a stone sticking out of the desert sand, in a town called Rosetta in northern Egypt. It had writing in two different languages, Egyptian and Greek and three different scripts – hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek. By comparing the Greek it was possible to decipher the hieroglyphics. This stone, a black, basalt slab, was called the Rosetta Stone, believed to have been written in 196 BC, during the reign of Ptolemy V. It can now be seen in the British Museum.

A key to some undecipherable mystery is sometimes called the Rosetta Stone after this serendipitous discovery.

Happy puzzling!