The Story of the Rosetta Stone (Words, Words, Words 25)

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The name "Rosetta Stone" has great brand recognition, but how much do you really know about Ptolemy V's royal decree? When you get right down to it, it's one of the wildest little corners of world history, stretching from the conquests of Alexander the Great to the defeat of Napoleon, with lots of bonkers facts in between. Plus it'll help us uncover more about the nature of language, logic, and humanity itself. Not bad for a hunk of rock!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There are some things that basically everybody knows the name of, but interestingly almost nobody knows anything about them.
0:09.7	So if you said Panama Canal, that's a famous phrase everybody knows, has heard that phrase before.
0:18.6	But how many people can tell you all that much about the Panama Canal?
0:22.1	Today I want to talk about one of those things which when you actually start to get to know
0:26.2	about it is one of the coolest things that exists in the world. Everybody
0:31.1	knows the name, various people know all that much about it. We got to talk about the Rosetta Stone is almost a brand name. It's like Kleenex. If I say hand me a Kleenex, even if the
0:50.7	brand that's sitting on the table isn't actually Kleen clinics, you're going to give me a nose tissue.
0:54.4	The Rosetta Stone is a real object, a real thing in the British Museum, but it's also a catchphrase or a buzzword, a byword for anything that unlocks a
1:06.2	translation that allows us to gain access into a code or a language that we didn't previously understand. And that's because it's the most famous
1:16.2	example of that happening in modern history. But that's basically all that anybody knows about it.
1:23.5	And when you start to look into it, the story of the Rosetta Stone is so cool,
1:26.5	it reveals so much about what we were always talking about on Fridays, on words, words, words,
1:30.5	and I had a question sort of about the Rosetta Stone.
1:34.2	So this is a follow-up question from last week's episode
1:38.0	about prophecy and translation and encryption.
1:41.2	And we've been following this thread about different ways to uncover hidden meaning.
1:47.0	And Blaine had a follow-up question that I'm going to get to next week that relates to the Rosetta Stone, but before I even tackle that,
1:54.5	I think we have to talk about the Rosetta Stone itself, because it's an object that is a major feature of the modern history of translation.
2:01.9	It has a lot to say about language and how it works
2:05.3	and how we work with it, but it's one of those things that unless you've spent time thinking
2:12.0	about this stuff, you might not really know all that much about it.
2:15.3	For me the Rosetta Stone is kind of a core memory from childhood because I grew up in London
	...

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