In Australia, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages. Until English arrived.
Read moreAllusionist 42+43. Survival: The Key rerun
To accompany the current Allusionist miniseries Survival, about minority languages facing suppression and extinction, we're revisiting this double bill of The Key episodes about why languages die and how they can be resuscitated.
The Rosetta Stone and its modern equivalent the Rosetta Disk preserve writing systems to be read by future generations. But how do those generations decipher text that wasn't written with the expectation of requiring decipherment?
Features mild scenes of linguistic apocalypse.
Read moreAllusionist 43: The Key part II - Vestiges
If you don't have a Rosetta Stone to hand, deciphering extinct languages can be a real puzzle, even though they didn't intend to be. They didn't intend to become extinct, either, but such is the life (and death) of languages.
Read moreAllusionist 42: The Key part I - Rosetta
Languages die. But if they're lucky, a thousand-odd years later, someone unearths an artefact that brings them back to life.
Laura Welcher of the Rosetta Project shows us the Rosetta Disk, a slice of electroplated nickel three inches in diameter that bears text in 1500 languages for future linguists to decipher. Ilona Regulski of the British Museum describes how its namesake, the Rosetta Stone, unlocked hieroglyphics.
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