References - Part 05

References:

A History of the Macedonian People, Institute of National History, Skopje, 1979

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_culture

Part 6 – Looking for Patterns I

As mentioned earlier, the Rosetta stone center text had no punctuation marks and no capital letters to divide sentences from paragraphs. It had no blank spaces or markers to divide sentences into words. In other words, the entire text was a single long column or unbroken string of symbols. So, where does one start?

Strongly believing the text was syllabic consisting of words, Boshevski and Tenton began to look for patterns that were repeated.

In a syllabic script each sign represents one syllable of the consonant-vowel type and is susceptible to the influence of the language in which it is written. This means that each language would have its own variant script specific to that language for which it was written. To understand this think of how the Latin script is used by various different languages today.

One can write in Spanish, English, French, German, Polish and Croatian using the Latin script. The alphabet is the same and the symbols with minor differences are also the same. Now think of a German speaking only German and reading Miroslav Krlezza written in Croatian? So it’s not enough to only recognize the alphabet, it is also important to know the language in which it was written.

A long time ago Egyptians, Persians and the people of Vincha wrote in their own language using this alphabet. So this appears to be a typical syllabic alphabet for enunciation of various different languages. The differences and characteristics are dictated by the spoken language. It is believed that the Ptolemies did not use the demotic script as an official script but rather made many changes to it when they began to rule. They made changes both to their literature and language. This was a smart move because they kept their writing and, like a newspaper, they wove their language. They also introduced another new aspect, ligatures which are not present in demotic scripts. Ligatures are characters that combine or tie multiple letters together (maximum of three).

I just want to mention at this point that Boshevski and Tentov were fully versed with past works and the intensive ongoing research surrounding the Rosetta stone center text.

Leading the pack in this study was The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, USA with the Dictionary and Grammar of the Demotic Language. Unfortunately they too, according to their publications, admit that they have not been able to successfully read the signs, sign by sign or syllable after syllable. They do however suggest that the text contains words written word after word, in a unique language in the forming of sentences, phrases in which are contained names of rulers and gods.

After a long, hard look at the text a number of repeating symbols were identified and isolated. What was interesting about these symbols is that they also existed in flipped forms around both the vertical and horizontal axis just like Cardan’s asymmetrical symbols representing the numbers.

This is a bit difficult to explain without the show of diagrams but if you feel you need to see examples please click on http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/ and have a look at section 1.1.1 “Asymmetrical Syllabic Signs”. To understand how this works, imagine the asymmetrical letter consonant “R” from the Latin alphabet being rotated 90 degrees clockwise four times and then each rotation flipped over or mirrored four more times. The “R” is still an “R” but appears to have fallen forward, flipped over, fallen backward or mirrored to look like “Я”. Now imagine that each “R” represents a different syllabic sound of the consonant-vowel type. Examples of consonants are “B”, “C”, “D”, “F”, “G”, “H”, etc, and vowels are “A”, “O”, “E”, “U”, “I”, etc. For example, upright “R” may give us the sound “RA”, whereas mirrored “Я” may give us the sound “RO” and so on. In other words one symbol used in this way has the potential of creating up to 8 different “R” sounds such as “RA”, “RO”, “RE”, “RU”, “RI”, etc.

Boshevski and Tentov managed to isolate and identify twelve such symbols of the asymmetrical type. This has a potential of creating 12 x 8 = 96 different syllables of the consonant vowel type.

Additionally Boshevski and Tentov also isolated and identified six symmetrical symbols. Symmetrical symbols are like the letter “W”, “T”, “M” etc, that when mirrored give the same results. So, symmetrical symbols can only yield four sounds. Thus the 6 symmetrical symbols have a potential of creating another 6 x 4 = 24 different syllables of the consonant-vowel type.

How then does this alphabet cater to words like “how” where we have a consonant-vowel-vowel or like the word “word” where we have vowel-vowel-consonant-consonant?