How to Translate With the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most Rosetta Stone language
important archaeological-historical discoveries in the world. Dating back to 196 BC, the stele (table stone) describes a decree of Ptolemy V, King of Ptolemaic Egypt, a successor kingdom to Alexander the Great's Macedonian empire. What makes it unique is that it bears the decree in three languages. These are Greek, demotic and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone allowed linguists to translate hieroglyphs for the first time. While translations are available, it is far more fun to learn for yourself. While a knowledge of Greek will help immensely, you can translate without it. Furthermore, you can use the Rosetta Stone to translate other hieroglyphs, too.Difficulty:Moderately ChallengingInstructions 1Familiarize yourself with the layout of the Rosetta Stone. You will notice the Egyptian hieroglyphs are at the top, the demotic in the middle and the Greek at the bottom.2Translate the Greek into English or another chosen language first. The Greek is the most accessible of the three languages. To translate the hieroglyphs, you will need to understand the Greek text.3Compare the Rosetta Stone Software
Greek to the hieroglyphs. The three texts relay the same information. This is the hardest stage to learn and the one that took Thomas Young of Britain and Jean-Francois Champollion the longest. Look for and highlight repeated words in the Greek text and for similar patterns in the hieroglyphs.4Find proper names in the stone by highlighting cartouches. A cartouche is a loop that surrounds a number of glyphs. The meaning of the cartouche was found by Thomas Young in 1814. Hieroglyphs represent phonetic sounds like Japanese kana (hiragana and katakana), not symbols or allegories like Chinese and Japanese kanji. Use other cartouches in other texts as a guide to learning the names of people and the phonetic sound of each unit.5Use the repeated words and symbols in the Greek and hieroglyph texts to translate the meanings and structure of the language. This will take quite some time and the incomplete nature of the stone will lead to an incomplete picture of the language. There are several code breaking tricks to use. For example:1. Look for how a tense change in Greek affects its hieroglyph counterpart's root.2. Check for plurals.3. Repeated articles such as "a" or "the."6Use what you have learned to translate hieroglyphs on Egyptian sites, photographs and objects. Rosetta Stone Italian
The stone does not contain all of the glyphs present in Egyptian, so there will be gaps in your knowledge.