Series“1822, deciphered hieroglyphs” (5/5). In the absence of a bilingual text like that of the Rosetta Stone, decoding an extinct language requires perseverance and technique.
What if there was a misunderstanding about Jean-François Champollion, who went down in history for having understood how the hieroglyphic writing system worked in 1822? What if his feat was above all to have reconstituted the language of the ancient Egyptians in just a few years? Because writing and language are two separate things. It suffices to be convinced of this to have before your eyes the following words – « The soul-enriching power of learning music » –, title of an article stolen from a Hungarian newspaper. Any reader of Monde will be able to decipher what is written sign by sign but, unless he knows Hungarian, the comprehension of the text will escape him.
Champollion’s “fortunate” was to know with near certainty that the Coptic language, which he mastered, descended from ancient Egyptian, which helped him to reconstruct it. Ditto for the Briton Michael Ventris (1922-1956), who, to decipher Linear B, writing from the Mycenaean civilization, made the winning bet that it was an archaic form of ancient Greek. The heirs of Champollion, who tackle unknown languages today, are not always so lucky. So it is with specialists in Etruscan, a language coded with an alphabet taken from Greek – therefore perfectly decipherable – but which has left no posterity. “Hopes for the Etruscan are minimalrecognizes Claude Rilly, professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and director of research at the CNRS. You would need a lot of bilingual texts to achieve that. »
Bilingual texts are indeed a Holy Grail in the collective imagination, because the Rosetta stone has left a strong impression there, but, in the history of deciphering, rare are the ancient languages that have been translated thanks to this kind of ‘tool.
Claude Rilly has two: “First of all Sumerian, a language that died in 2000 BC. J.-C., but which remained the “Latin” of the Akkadian scribes [langue sémitique proche de l’hébreu ou de l’arabe classique, qui fut parlée pendant environ deux millénaires en Mésopotamie]. We have bilinguals in spades, glossaries, and that made it possible to decipher it. The other example is Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language. [dont les traces ont été retrouvées dans le Xinjiang, en Chine]. Entire libraries have been discovered in caves with bilingual texts in Old Uyghur. »
“The first thing to do is to try to enter the language through proper names. Claude Rilly, professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and research director at the CNRS
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