The wonderful World of Language

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The wonderful World of Language

• With John Patrick and Allen Hart

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The Magic of Language

• Without language how would we communicate? We
  couldnt! Without it we wouldnt have friends, we
  wouldnt be civilized. We probably wouldnt have
  invented many of the things today, and if we did
  no one would know about them. With no language
  there wouldnt be education, we would be
  primitive and basic.

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Sumerian

• The Sumerian language is the oldest known
  language. Sumerian was written in cuneiform
  script. Its earliest records date from about 3000
  bc, and after about 2000 bc it was no longer
  spoken, but it continued in use as a literary
  language until cuneiform writing was no longer
  used. The existence of the language and of the
  Sumerian culture was subsequently forgotten until
  cuneiform was deciphered in the 19th century,
  revealing an unexpected language among the
  expected ones. Sumerian language uses letters,
  much like the English language. The alphabet
  consists of six vowels and 15 consonants a, e,
  ô, a, e, ü, being the vowels, and b, p, t, d, g,
  k, z, s, sh, ch, r, l, m, n, and ng being the
  consonants. The sentence structure was also much
  like the English sentence structure. The language
  was simple, yet useful and much like English.

Example of cuneiform
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Rosetta Stone

• A French officer of Napoleons engineering crew
  found the stone near the city of Rosetta, Egypt,
  in 1799. Known as the Rosetta Stone, it provided
  the key to the translation of ancient Egyptian
  characters. The Rosetta Stone, which was created
  in 196 BC, contains this message decree praising
  the Egyptian King Ptolemy V, it is carved in
  three different scripts Egyptian hieroglyphs,
  Egyptian demotic, and Greek. Scholars deciphered
  the hieroglyphic and demotic versions by
  comparing them to the Greek translation. It also
  revealed Israels History.

The Rosetta Stone.
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Behistun Rock

• Scholars learned to decipher cuneiform after
  finding inscriptions on the Behistun Rock, a
  cliff in western Iran. The Behistun Inscription
  was written in three languages Persian,
  Babylonian and Elamite, all of which used
  cuneiform as a system of writing. Translation of
  the inscription was helped by the resemblance of
  Persian and Babylonian to modern languages, and
  by the fact that all three inscriptions contain
  the same text.

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Tablets of Ugarit

• The Ugarit tablets were discovered in northern
  Lebanon. They allowed scholars to decipher the
  somatic language of the Canaanites.

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Ancient Languages

• Many of the modern languages derive from ancient
  languages. By discovering these languages we are
  able to find out how ours came about. The stones
  that have been described allow us to translate
  Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian,
  Eblaite, Amorite, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramic,
  Syiac, Greek, and Latin.

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Recognitions

• Information gathered from Encarta Encyclopedia by
  John Patrick and Allen Hart
• Background picture made with Photoshop 7.0 by
  Allen Hart
• Pictures Found on WWW.YAHOO.COM picture search by
  John Patrick

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