Name-dropping:
Rosetta Stone (pronunciation: Roh-ZEH-tuh) (discovered in 1799).
A single ancient stone discovered near the city of Rosetta in Egypt (one does begin to wish after a while that people would be more creative in naming their discoveries) that contains the same text written in two languages (Egyptian and Greek) in three scripts (Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic). Using a magical decoder ring, or possibly their wits, linguists eventually learned how to decipher hieroglyphics from it.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
At the company Christmas party, when the close-talking, whiskey-gulping manager from Accounts Receivable starts slurring his words to the degree that he is no longer speaking a language that can technically be classified as English, you can just smile brightly, give a bit of Rosetta Stone history, say that you’re off to track down one that translates Drunk Talk, and take your leave of him.

The Basics
For centuries, Egyptian hieroglyphics were absolutely incomprehensible. Pyramid, crow, lion, squiggly line—what? But in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered. Part of the stone was inscribed in ancient Greek, which everybody worth their salt could read back in 1799. The Greek was a (pretty boring, really) decree affirming loyalty to Emperor Ptolemy V (who at that time was all of 13 years old). Beside the Greek, the same decree was repeated in ancient Egypt’s demotic script, and beside that, in hieroglyphics. Problem solved, right?

Not quite. Although the Rosetta Stone was the rare puzzle whose solution had actual consequences for our understanding of history— imagine if you could become famous for finishing one New York Times crossword puzzle—it proved considerably more complicated than a Jumble or a Rubik’s cube.

The first person to make any headway with the Rosetta Stone was not a linguist but a physicist. Thomas Young proved that a certain set of hieroglyphics seemed to align with the Greek rendering for Ptolemy, and by observing the direction in which the bird characters faced (really), Young figured out the direction in which to read the hieroglyphics.

The central hindrance remained that scholars believed particular pictographs stood for ideas (i.e., that the lion meant the word war). It was Frenchman John-François Champollion who finished unraveling the mystery in 1824, when he etablished that some hieroglyphs were syllables and others letters of a kind of alphabet. Upon realizing that hieroglyphics were a phonetic script, Champollion is said to ahve fainted for five entire days (although to be fair, he was generally kind of a drama queen). Upon awaking, supposedly, he used the few hieroglyphs in “Ptolemy” to painstakingly translate the entire Rosetta Stone. The Stone, in turn, allowed scholars to understand the whole body of hieroglyphic literature, from that of the Great Pyramids to that of crumbling papyri.

The Rosetta Project
Lest humans (or aliens!) of the future have to suffer the way Champollion, we will soon have parallel texts recorded in 1,000 languages. Begun in 2000, the Rosetta Project, a collaboration among linguists worldwide, intends to etch the 1,000 parallel texts into nickel alloy plates that are believed to last 2,000 years. The creators of the project argue that between 50 and 90 percent of the world’s current languages will disappear in the next century due to ever-increasing globalization.

Extra Credit: UNCOMMON LANGUAGES
Some languages that may be in urgent need of a Rosetta
Stone of their own:

Eyak. Historically spoken by natives in south-central Alaska, there is exactly one Eyak speaker alive today: Marie Smith Jones of Anchorage, Alaska, age 87 at this writing.

Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa, spoken in Australia’s Borroloola, Northern Territory, and Doomadgee, Queensland, and one of several endangered aboriginal languages, is unique because men and women speak very distinct dialects.

Klingon. A disconcertingly large number of people still speak Klingon (the language, derived from the Star Trek series, has its own dictionary), but with no new Star Trek series currently on the air, one can hope against hope that Klingon’s days might be numbered.

YOU’RE NOT GETTING IT BACK!
Recently, formerly colonized nations have begun noting that a lot of their priceless treasures seem to be located in European museums. And that, according to the once colonized, seems rather akin to stealing. In 2005, Egypt formally requested that the British Museum return the Rosetta Stone to its native land. But British law prevents the museum from giving up anything in its collection (even items looted by the Nazis that ended up in Britain). So, theoretically, if an employee of the British Museum wrenched a lollipop from the tiny hands of the Little Orphan Annie and then put that lollipop in the museum’s collection, it could–literally–not legally be returned to poor Annie. As for the Rosetta Stone dispute, it has yet to be settled.

Conversation Starters
◆ Some scholars now argue that Champollion wasn’t the first to crack the Rosetta Stone’s secrets at all. A London researcher argues that Arabic alchemist Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiya, whose name is equally long in pictographs, translated hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone nearly 1,000 years ago.

◆ Aside from helping to decode the Rosetta Stone, physicist Thomas Young also became a prominent advocate for the theory that light was waves, not streams of particles, as Newton claimed. (Einstein proved that both Young and Newton were right: Apparently, light behaves both as waves and as particles, which is the kind of idea that makes our heads hurt.)

◆ While most of us are content to leave whiskey at Jim Morrison’s tomb in Paris, linguistically inclined visitors to Champillion’s grave in Paris often leave sheets of papyrus at the tomb to honor his accomplishment.