Rosetta Stone - Online Language Learner

http://www.rosettastone.com/buynow?redir=http://www.rosettastone.ca/

As the Rosetta stone was used as a template to help us decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Rosetta Stone software company offers the possibility of being able to learn languages with an online app.  Rather than teaching people the language through the use of flash cards, translations, tapes or books (methods of language learning they tell you to forget), they prefer to teach language through "Dynamic Immersion", a step-by-step process of associating words with visual language.

But I can perceive easy problems with this method of learning.  The structure of other languages, the tenses they utilize, and the cases of words can differ drastically (I know this from learning Latin), and I believe it would be more efficient to learn such structures of the language through study of the language in a book and through translations. 

After all, knowing the structure of sentences can be very important when translating from one language to another, as sentences do not have similar structures across the languages. 

British Museum - Ancient Egypt Writing

http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html

The above hyperlink leads to a site linked to the British Museum describing the Rosetta Stone.  The various points about the Rosetta Stone are divided into sections by questions asked about it.  The answers given are short but to the point, explaining what it is, its origins, why it is written in three different languages, and its general history.

Unfortunately, because the answers are so short that they do miss a number of details.  As an example, while they do explain that the Rosetta Stone was found in a town called Rashid (Rosetta, hence its name), and while it does explain he knew both Greek and Coptic, which helped him to decipher the manuscripts, it neglected to mention, unlike the video in my earlier blog, that Champollion also used the Philae Obelisk as a means to assist him in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

So while the site does give straight-forward answers, the information is limited, and looking for sites with more in-depth analysis and description of both the history of the Rosetta Stone and of Champollion would be recommended.

Jean Champollion and The Rosetta Stone

The above is a National Geographics clip discussing how Jean Champollion, the man who transliterated the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was able to decipher it.  The video briefly describes what languages are on the stone, and what was written upon it - commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy V (Ptolemes in Greek) in 196 BCE, and the later half discusses how the Philae obelisk was used to help decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs through comparisons of the symbols in the names Ptolemy, and Cleopatra.  This led to the realization that, while some hieroglyphs were ideograms and pictograms, the hieroglyphs essentially represented letters and syllables.

The clip, which is part of a larger documentary, outlines the significance behind the Rosetta Stone in the study of Egyptian culture, and how it was significant in helping archaeologists to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs that had previously eluded scholars.