評論
打印
Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics.
設想你就是商博良，你正在檢視著一疊寫滿了古埃及象形文字的紙莎草紙。
Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw.
這時，你遇上一個圖案，畫的是一個男人拿著一把鋸子。
"Very well," you would say, "that means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree."
你會說：“好啊，它的意思當然是指一個農夫拿著鋸子出去伐木。”
Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of eighty-two.
然后，你又看另一張紙。它講的是一位皇后在82歲高齡時死去的故事。
In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the man with the saw.
在句子中間，你再次看見了這個男人拿著一把鋸子的圖像。
Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But what?
82歲的皇后當然不會去做伐木之類的事情。這個圖像肯定代表著別的意思。可到底是什么意思呢？
That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved.
這就是被那位法國人解決的謎。
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call "phonetic writing"
這就是法國人商搏良最終為我們揭示的謎底。
a system of characters which reproduce the "sound" (or phone) of the spoken word
他發現，古埃及人是第一個運用了“語音文字”的人。
and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pothooks.
這種文字再現了口語單詞的聲音，憑著一些點、劃、撇、捺，它讓我們能夠把所有的口頭語言都以書面的形式記錄下來。
Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw.
讓我們回到一個男人拿著—把鋸子的圖案上。“鋸”（saw）這個單詞，
The word "saw" either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb "to see."
它一方面意味著你在木工店看見的一件工具，另一方面，它又代表動詞“看”（to see）的過去時。
This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries.
這個單詞在古埃及是這樣變化的：
First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented.
首先，它只代表著圖案中特定的工具“鋸子”。
Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a verb.
后來, 這個意義逐漸失去了，它變成了一個動詞過去時。
