John Boswell, one of my great heroes, Yale professor, medieval philologist who spoke or read Old Icelandic, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, early & modern Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Armenian, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Akkadian, Scandinavian languages. His book “Christianity, Social Tolerance & Homosexuality” is one my treasured possessions. Documentary about his life & work “Not a tame lion” is out now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0B8PWHQZZ/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r #lgbtq#philology#linguist#linguistics
French philologist and orientalist Jean-François Champollion was born #OTD in 1790.
He is known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. In 1822, he was the first to decipher the hieroglyphs inscribed on the Rosetta Stone discovered in Egypt in 1798, paving the way for the understanding of a thousand-year-old civilization. via @wikipedia
"C'est un système complexe, une écriture tout à la fois figurative, symbolique et phonétique, dans un même texte, une même phrase, je dirais presque dans un même mot."
It's a complex system, writing figuratively, symbolically and phonetically all at once, in the same text, the same sentence, I'd almost say in the same word.
Lettre à M. Dacier, 27 septembre 1822 de Jean-François Champollion
~Jean-François Champollion (23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832).
Current consensus is that in a certain passage on the Chicago Prism, King Sennacherib of #Assyria is talking about the custom of his forefathers to commission bronze statuary "imitating real-life forms" for their temples. In the first 1924 translation, when #cuneiform#philology had of course not yet made all of today's advances, the king is made to speak about how his ancestors "fashioned a bronze image in the likeness of their members" for the temples. Teee-heee.
Cited Notes Concerning Johann Gottfried von Herder and Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation
4. Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation...