2016年3月13日功课

HIEROGLYPHICS

象形文字

THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD OF HISTORY BEGINS

埃及人发明了书写的技艺，开始记录历史。

THESE earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages and would have developed a civilisation of their own. But suddenly there came an end to their isolation. They were discovered.

那些生活在欧洲大荒原上我们最早的祖先们很快学会了学多新东西。可以肯定的是，他们的野性在适当的时候退化了，并且发展了他们自己的文明。但是突然的，与世隔绝被打断了，他们被发现了。

2016年3月14日功课

A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of the European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt.

一个来自南部某地的旅行者，冒险翻越高山，渡过大海，来到了欧洲大陆，并且发现了这里的野人。他来自非洲，他的家乡在埃及。

2016年3月15日功课

The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the human race.

当西方的人类还在幻想能用上叉子、轮子或住上房子时，尼罗河领域的人类已经发展出高度文明几千年了。当我们访问地中海的南部和东部海岸时，我们会因此离开我们曾曾祖父居住的山洞，地中海沿岸矗立着人类最早的学校。

2016年3月16日功课

The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit of future generations. They had invented the art of writing.

这个埃及人教会了我们许多事情。他们是优秀的农民。他们精通灌溉。他们建造了神庙，后来被希腊人学会了，那是我们每天在其中做礼拜的教堂最初的原型。他们发明了日历，那已被证明是测量时间用的最好的工具。直到今天，日历仍在使用，并且很少变动。但最重要的是，埃及人为了有益于后代，他们学会了怎么记录语言，他们发明了书写的技艺。

2016年3月17日功课

We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs, who can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have gone before.

我们对报纸、书籍和杂志太习以为常，以至于认为书写和阅读是理所当然的事。事实上，书写这项人类最重要的发明，还十分崭新。如果不会记录档案，我们会和猫狗一样。因为不会书写，它们仅仅可以教会它们幼仔很少的事情，它们没有办法利用以前数代猫狗所经历的经验。

2016年3月18日功课

In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not interested in ``anything foreign'' and did not inquire into the origin of these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus reed. 

在公元前一世纪，当罗马人来到埃及时，他们发现这片流域充满了奇怪的小块图画，看上去画着跟这个国家历史有关的东西。这些奇怪的图形覆盖着宫殿和庙宇的墙壁上，画在无数张芦苇做成的草纸上，但罗马人对任何外语的东西都不感兴趣，他们也没有深究这些可疑图画的起源。

2016年3月19日功课

The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art of making such pictures had died several years before. Egypt deprived of its independence had become a store-house filled with important historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use to either man or beast.

最后一个懂得制作这种图画的宗教艺术的埃及神父，已经在几年前去世了。埃及失去了他的独立性，成为了一个重要历史文献的储藏室。这些文献没有人可以理解，对于人类和动物没有世俗的意义。

2016年3月20日功课

Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.

1700多年过去了，埃及依然是一片神秘的土地。但是在1798年，一个叫波拿巴的法国将军突然造访东非，在这里准备对英国的印度殖民地发起袭击。他没有跨过尼罗河，他的战役以失败告终。不过，十分意外的是，这个著名的法国探险队解决了古老的埃及图形语言问题。

2016年3月21日功课

One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta.And behold!he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt it was covered with little figures.But this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek language was known. ``All that is necessary,'' so he reasoned, ``is to compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets. ''

有一天，一位在尼罗河支流罗塞塔河上修建工事的年轻法国官员非常厌烦他的工作，决定到尼罗河三角洲的废墟上翻捡一番，已打发一些无聊的时间。大跌眼镜！他发现了一块让他十分困惑的石头。像埃及其它所有的东西一样，这石头表面画满了图案。但是这块独特的黑色玄武岩平板石块与以往发现的任何东西都不一样。它有三种字体的铭文，其中一种是希腊文。希腊文是能读懂的。"那就有必要，"所以他推断到“就是是把希腊文与埃及的图画作对比，它们就将马上解释出埃及图形的意义。”

2016年3月22日功课

The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history.

这个计划听起来十分简单，但人们花了二十年来揭开谜底。在1802年，一个叫商博良的法国教授开始对比分析著名的罗塞塔石上的希腊文和埃及文。到1823年，他宣布发现了着十四个小图形的意思。没过多久他因为劳累过度去世了，但是埃及文书写的主要法则留给了后人。今天，尼罗河流域的故事要比密西西比河流域的故事更为人所知。我们拥有一个四千年跨度的编年史文字记录。

2016年3月23日功课

As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means ``sacred writing'') have played such a very great rôle in history, (a few of them in modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming generations.

关于这套复杂精巧的文字体系你因该知道一些，因为这古老的埃及象形文字（意思是神圣的文字）曾经在历史上扮演了十分重要的角色（有少数图形的演化版甚至可以在我们的字母表中找到）。在五十世纪以前，象形文字被用来记录话语以造福后代。

2016年3月24日功课（网点聚餐，酒后）

Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages writter{sic} in the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to understand the meaning of such messages.

当然，你知道符号语言是怎么一回事。我们西部平原上每一个关于印第安人的故事里都有大篇幅介绍奇怪的信使用图片记录故事，讲述他们为了一场宴会杀了多少犀牛和出动了多少猎人。一般来说，理解这些图片信息不是很困难。

2016年3月25日功课

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now.

但是，古老的埃及语不是一种符号语言。聪明的尼罗河人已经大大超出了那个阶段的水平。他们的图片所表示的意思远远超出图片所画事物本身代表的意义，现在我将试着给你解释一下。

2016年3月26日功课

Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics.Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw.``Very well,'' you would say, ``that means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree. '' Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But what?

假设你是商博良，你正在检查一摞写满了象形文字的莎草纸稿件。突然你看到一张图，上面画着一个拿着一把锯的男人。“很好”您会说，“那个图的意思当然是一个农夫外出去砍倒一个树。”然后你拿起了另一张莎草纸。它讲述了一个女王的故事，女王在82岁死去。在这些句子中间出现了那副画着拿着一把锯的男人的图片。82岁的女王不那锯子。因此这幅图片一定有别的意思。但意味着什么呢？

2016年3月27日功课

That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call ``phonetic writing'' -- a system of characters which reproduce the ``sound'' (or phone) of the spoken word and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pothooks.

这就是那个法国人最后解决的难题。他发现埃及人是最早使用今天我们所说的“拼音文字”的。这种符号系统将口语词汇的“发声（音位）”再现，并通过配合使用少量的点、破折号和钩划，可以将全部口语词汇转化成书写形式。

2016年3月28日功课

Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word ``saw'' either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb ``to see. ''

让我们回忆一下那个拿着一把锯的小家伙。单词“saw”既是一种你可以在木器店里找到的工具，也是单词“看到”的过去时态。

This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a verb. After several hundred years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and the picture 

这便是这个单词在数个世纪过程中所发生的事情。首先，它的意思只是它所代表的一种确切的工具。然后，那个意思就消失了，它变成了一个单词的过去分词。几百年之后，那两种解释埃及人都不用了，

came to stand for a single letter, the letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in hieroglyphics.

那幅图变成只代表一个单独的字母，就是字母S。下面的一个小句子将会把我的意思展示给你。这是一句用象形文字的写法写成的现代英语句子。

2016年3月29日功课

The 

这幅图

either means one of these two round objects in your head, which allow you to see or it means ``I,'' the person who is talking.

既代表你头上长着的那两个用来看的园东西中的一个，也表示“我”，就是谁在说话。

A 

这幅图

is either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents the verb ``to be'' which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part of a verb like ``be-come'' or ``be-have. '' In this particular instance it is followed by

既表示一种采蜜的昆虫，也代表一个动词“存在”，意思就是存在。同时它也可能是像“成为”或者“表现”这些动词的前半部分。在这句话中它后面紧跟一副这个图画，

which means a ``leaf'' or ``leave'' or ``lieve'' (the sound of all three words is the same).

这幅图意思是一片“叶子”或者“离开”也或者“了以的”（这三个词的发音都一样）。

The ``eye'' you know all about.

这个“眼睛”你知道什么意思。

2016年3月30日功课

Finally you get the picture of a

最后你看到一幅这样的图。

It is a giraffe. It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics developed.

图中是一个长颈鹿。它是古老的符号语言的一部分，象形文字就是由此发展而来的。

You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.

现在，你可以毫不费力的把这句话读出来了。

``I believe I saw a giraffe. ''

“我认为我看到一只长颈鹿。”

2016年3月31日功课

Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands of years until they could write anything they wanted, and they used these ``canned words'' to send messages to friends, to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country, that future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past.

埃及人至从发明了这套文字系统以后，经过了几千年的发展，直到他们可以写出任何他们想写的东西。他们使用这种“录音文字”给朋友发信息，记录商业帐务，也记录自己国家的历史。如此一来，他们的后代就可以在前辈的失败中获得借鉴。