And the process continues! I think when it comes to
translating languages or even just basic communicating, the process is never
really finished. Even though each group created a Rosetta Stone, a finished
product of translation between 3 languages, there were still imperfections,
places to improve, things to add in. And so this is our process went…
We received the talipot palm leaf from the ancient Indian
group. Thankfully, it was very legible and not terribly difficult to inscribe.
We originally knew that it was written in Sanskrit, so that was our starting
point. We noticed that there was a line, almost continuous, running through the
text, but we didn’t know whether it went on the top or the bottom. Like Dr.
Burton said, when using new languages, we have to reorient ourselves, whether we
read the language right to left, clockwise, or upside down. From there, we
tried to look up the translation character for character or word for word, but
there are thousands of characters for Sanskrit, each connoting a different
sound which then creates a word. We scrapped that idea and tried to find a specific authentic phrase they might have
used. I knew, because Rachel is in our blogging group, that the Vedas were a
sacred scriptural text very prominent in ancient Aryan culture. We then looked
up the Vedas and found that the inscription came from the last line of the Rig
Veda Book One, Hymn One. The phrase looked like this…
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| (check out this website for more on the Vedas’ history, content, and translation) |
