"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." Charles A. Beard
Showing posts with label Rosetta Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosetta Stone. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Write Like an Egyptian
For the Rosetta Stone project I was in the African cultures group. Fittingly enough for a project emulating the famous stone, we decided to write out our message in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics... and because that's virtually the only written language of ancient Africa that has been translated into English, so we had no choice in the matter. Now, I'm not trying to make this project sound miserable, it really ended up being a lot of fun! It was really cool to see just what challenges played into the translation of ancient texts. Follow after the jump to find out for yourself!
Monday, November 14, 2011
Our Own Rosetta "Stone" sort of
What I got to help with for the making of our Rosetta Stone was the writing of the 2nd half of the project. Alicia emailed me the translation for the Greek wax that we got from the other group and the translation said,
"Equo ne credite, Teucri! Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.
Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans,
even when bringing gifts.
不要相信馬,木馬!不管是什麼,我怕希臘人,甚至帶來的禮物時,"
This project turned out to be a much more challenging thing than I expected. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to fit all of the project on this one medium so I first had to write it on the project lightly. My first attempt was to large. The Greek was not going to fit on the medium with the English and the Chinese on my first try. So i shrunk down the Greek to take up a smaller space and this time it was the proper size which was awesome. It took me a few hours to pencil out all the symbols and then another two and a half hours to paint over the symbols that I had made. When I got to the Chinese, my friend Rebecca came over and helped me cause she looked at my Chinese symbols and let me know that what I was doing did not really have the flow of Chinese symbols. My writing didn't have the curves that Chinese character should.
Also I was lucky enough to be doing my writing around my friend PJ and had him read over the Chinese that I had written. He said that my symbols were correct but I didn't have some of the symbols grouped together correctly. Lucky for me I was able to fix the problem with my writing and so now my looks good with only a mistake in one spot, an ink smear. Over all I learned that some mediums are better than other at helping to write different languages. Luckily we chose a medium that even though the message is somewhat long it was able to include all three languages very easily.
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