References - Part 07

References:

http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/

Part 8 – Wiring for Sound I

The genius in deciphering an ancient and virtually unknown language is not in identifying its symbols or its alphabet, but in one’s ability to (a) put sounds to the letters, (b) make words with the letters, (c) put meaning to each word and (d) translate the message and what it conveys.

The easiest thing to do is identify all the unique symbols in the message. If someone gave you an essay and asked you to generate all the symbols used to create the essay, you would go through the entire essay and cross out symbols one by one as you identify them. When you crossed out every letter, period, coma, etc, in the essay you will have had a set of unique symbols. If the essay is long and comprehensive enough, you would have discovered most if not all of the alphabet and other symbols used by the language to write the essay. Now, if you don’t know anything about the language the essay was written in, you would have an impossible time determining the sound of each letter. Unless you know the language or of the language, you will have no idea what each letter sounds like. Even if you are able to find what each letter sounds like and go back to the essay and start reading it, you would have no idea what the words mean.

The reader should appreciate the difficulty Boshevski and Tentov faced while trying to wire each symbol for sound. The fact that the text was written in a string of symbols without any punctuation marks, capital letters or spaces to separate words from sentences made it even more difficult. Even if they managed to identify the sounds of each symbol and isolate the words in a string of text, how would they know what each word meant if they didn’t know the language? It would be impossible. So how did they do it?

Boshevski and Tentov relied heavily in finding similarities in the Koine or so-called “Greek text”. Even though they never assumed the message was identical in all three texts, they were sure some segments of the text, like the names of rulers and gods would be in all three texts.

As mentioned earlier, Boshevski and Tentov had already isolated repeating patterns of symbols which they assumed to be words. It was now a matter of identifying what each represented.

Also as mentioned earlier, Boshevski and Tentov had already seen some of the symbols they found in the Rosetta stone center text on the Vincha tablet and in Grinevich’s book “Slav Literacy”. Here Grinevich talks about the existence of old writing found in Russia, the Ukraine and Poland and in this writing he eluded to the symbol consisting of three vertical lines “|||” as being a reference to “God”. Boshevski and Tentov found over one-hundred occurrences of this symbol in the Rosetta text. The three vertical line symbol was also found on a Vincha tablet and there too were references of it being the symbol for “God”.

Not being one-hundred percent certain however, Boshevski and Tentov went back to the Rosetta texts to verify the symbol’s meaning. There they found an adjective written with this symbol which was identified to mean divine or “bozhen” in Macedonian. The same symbol was found in front of Alexander the Greats’ name also meaning divine or “bozhenstveniot” in Macedonian.

The second most prolific use of a symbol besides “|||” denoting God or “Boga” in Macedonian was the symbol “///” which was discovered to mean master or “gospoda” in Macedonian.

So by isolating symbol patterns on the Rosetta stone center text and noting their position in the string of text and then cross referencing these with the already translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Koine or so-called “Greek text”, Boshevski and Tentov began to isolate and identify the various names and titles of the people mentioned on the stone.

How did they know the names and titles were written in Ancient Macedonian and not in Ancient Egyptian?