"Anti-quity" does not mean you're 'against quitting.'

Isn't this exciting? Another day filled with fun and adventure!

And hieroglyphics, if you're me, Jenna, or the rest of our culture group.

Our group was the African cultures. Since the Bushmen don't have a written language, and no one can read the one for Tanner's culture, we decided to work in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

This was kind of a fun assignment. Those in my group may not have picked this up about me, but I love languages. I think translating things is oddly enjoyable. People might think I'm weird for that, like they do when I tell them I think chocolate covered pretzels taste good dipped in salsa, but I really do enjoy trying to convey the idea of an original text into a new language.

I also like making quasi-ancient artifacts. So this was really, as our friends across the pond might say, my cup of tea.

Here's my group's original clay tablet.

(It's on its side.)

We couldn't find any papyrus, like Jenna told you all in class, and the clay here wasn't good enough, so we had to fly to Egypt and discover a tomb to raid for an actual tablet. Just kidding. Obviously.

But really, we did use clay, which we carved with our chosen phrase, and then we fired it and Brenda was kind enough to paint it and make it look really cool. I only have pictures of it before the paint, but it's still quite nice, I think.

Then we got our tablet to translate. This is what the other group wrote:

Their tablet was also made of clay, though theirs wasn't fired, as you might be able to tell. Their culture was the Greeks, for which I was grateful, since that's a fairly straightforward alphabet to transliterate into the Roman characters that we use in English.

Here's a rough approximation of the Greek writing:

Andra moi ennepe mousa polytropon hos malapolla

One possible translation in English was:

"Tell me muse, of the man of many ways, who..."

However, they left off the last word, "planchthe," which would have made the thought more complete, since what they actually wrote was actually the first line of the Odyssey, and not the first whole sentence.

With 'planchthe' added in, it reads along the lines of:

"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways who wandered much."

See my link above for a slightly different interpretation.

I think that this is a funny example of how things are 'lost in translation', or even transcription from one media to another.

In any case, to make the thought they had carved for us more complete, we added in the last word when we put it on our Rosetta Tablet, shown below with the translation into English and Hieroglyphics:

The hieroglyphics were even more interesting to work with this time, since we were using words written by an entirely separate culture and civilization - however, the great thing is that there is actually an Egyptian word for 'muse,' or Hathor, and hence a hieroglyphic.

Literally, our Egyptian translation reads:

"Say/speak, Hathor, (of the) Man (of) many roads (and) large travel."

I think we were able to capture the basic thought pretty well, despite the difficulties of using Egyptian. However, "of many ways" in the original probably had a connotation closer to 'resourceful' or 'skilled in many things' (see here for an alternate translation like these ones). Again, translation will never be quite as good as the real thing, in my opinion (unless it's by the power of God as per the Book of Mormon). I remember reading a book by a German author which had been translated into English, and feeling like the whole thing was oddly... off in how it was written. Not wrong, but it was strangely apparent that it had not been written in the language I was reading it in. Another reason learning many languages would be beneficial to us as learners.

Interestingly, and bringing in our past discussions from class, we were mostly limited to written sources of knowledge in our translation. The internet, obviously, cannot translate words into hieroglyphics very easily, except with the phonetic kind, and even then only to a limited extent. So we had to look through books of hieroglyphics, which were organized not by meaning, but by structure or symbolism, to try to find the right glyphs. And it felt great coming up with the closest ones we could find to the original meaning.

Just for fun, here's a paper from my notebook that shows me trying to work out how to write all the hieroglyphs in rough form:

So you see, there's a lot of work that we put into getting it right before we ever carved it into the clay! I think we've gotten accustomed to disposable media - typing, you can go back and fix things when you mess up, as I've already done SIX TIMES in this one sentence. Eight times now. With rock or clay or even just old fashioned papyrus, mistakes were significantly harder to cover up.

It makes me wonder how the prophets of the Nephites felt about writing on the plates. As one of my seminary teachers said once, it wasn't as though they had a little "liquid gold" vial to pour into the carvings if they made a mistake.

But perhaps that's a topic to delve more deeply into when we have more time.

Until then,

See you in class!

Atra du evarínya ono varda.