Lost Languages The Enigma Of The Worlds Undeciphered Scripts

There's something perennially fascinating about undeciphered languages. Looking at the rows of incomprehensible symbols, it's impossible not to wonder what meaning they carry, whether our whole understanding of the civilizations that bore them might be transformed if we could only unlock their secrets. Andrew Robinson shares this fascination, and in this excellent book he introduces us to three ancient languages that have been successfully deciphered and another eight that have yet to be understood. The first famous decipherment was that of Egyptian hieroglyphics, accomplished by the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion in the early 19th century. Champollion's triumph was made possible by the Rosetta Stone, which carries the same inscription in three different languages - Greek, Egyptian demotic and hieroglyphic. By means of translating the Greek inscription and locating the proper names within the other two, Champollion painstakingly managed not only to discover the meaning of hieroglyphic words but also to assign each hieroglyph a phonetic value and thus work out the Egyptian alphabet. Similar techniques were used in the decipherment of Linear B, a language preserved on clay tablets in Crete and mainland Greece, although in this case there were no parallel inscriptions. Michael Ventris - an architect by training who was obsessed with Linear B from his teens - worked out the phonetic values of the syllabic alphabet by a complicated process of decoding, and discovered to his astonishment that the language revealed was an early form of Greek, sharing many similarities with the grammar and vocabulary of Homer. But Linear A - superficially similar to Linear B but seemingly representing a different language altogether - has yet to be deciphered, and Robinson describes the frustrating and so far vain attempts to link it to other tongues. Perhaps the most mysterious language discussed here is rongorongo, which is found on the tablets of Easter Island, one of the most isolated areas on Earth and home of the strange beautiful stone statues. It's not even clear whether rongorongo is a proper alphabet or just a series of pictograms intended as an aide-memoire for storytellers, but this hasn't prevented scholars over the years from coming up with numerous contradictory interpretations. Robinson explains the different types of alphabet and the complex process of decipherment clearly and straightforwardly, illustrating his text with numerous diagrams and photographs of the original inscriptions. Most importantly, he never forgets that the real significance of these tantalising scripts is not their linguistic identity as such, but rather what they tell us about the civilizations they come from. The decipherment of Linear B was a triumph of ingenuity, but the surviving tablets bearing the language consist only of lists, whereas the Mayan glyphs reveal a fascination with blood and sacrifice. Whether there are any similar revelations hidden in the still-mysterious languages recorded here, only time will tell. (Kirkus UK)