托福阅读素材之埃及罗塞塔石碑.docx

1、托福阅读素材之埃及罗塞塔石碑托福阅读素材之埃及罗塞塔石碑 A Rosetta Stone for a lost language 0:11 Id like to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that its 4,000 years into the future. Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist - no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. All knowledge of the English langu

2、age and the English alphabet has been lost. Now imagine archeologistsdigging through the rubble of one of our cities. What might they find? Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. Maybe some cylindrical containers with some

3、 symbols on them. And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers - buried in the hills somewhere in North America - massive versions of these same symbols. Now lets ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future? 1:14 This is

4、 no hypothetical question. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question were faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. The Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations,b

5、ut it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. Given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really

6、 powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. Theyve found small objects such as these. 1:59 Heres an example of one of these objects. Well obviously this is a replica. But who is this person? A king? A god? A pri

7、est? Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? We dont know. But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. Now

8、 we dont know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. In fact, we dont even know what any of these objects say, and thats because the Indus script is undeciphered. We dont know what any of these symbols mean. 2:44 The symbols are most commonly found on seals. So you see up there one

9、 such object. Its the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. Now thats a magnificent piece of art. So how big do you think that is? Perhaps that big? Or maybe that big? Well let me show you. Heres a replica of one such seal.Its only about one inch by one inch in size - pretty tiny. So wha

10、t were these used for? We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? These were used to make those kinds of packing slips. You might wonder what these

11、 objects contain in terms of their text.Perhaps theyre the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other - we dont know. We need to decipher the script to answer that question. 3:38 Deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it

12、s actually become a question thats become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. First, theres a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Ind

13、us script does not represent a language at all. These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. Theres a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. If you l

14、ook at a map of India today, youll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit. 4:28 Theres a last group of people who believe that the Ind

15、us people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket o

16、f Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian. 5:03 Which of these hypotheses can be true? We dont know,

17、 but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. First, theres no Rosetta Stone. I dont mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. We d

18、ont have such an artifact for the Indus script.And furthermore, we dont even know what language they spoke. And to make matters even worse,most of the text that we have are extremely short. So as I showed you, theyre usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny. 5:37 And so given these form

19、idable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. In the rest of my talk, Id like to tell you about how I learned to stop worryingand love the challenge posed by the Indus script. Ive always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read

20、about it in a middle school textbook. And why was I fascinated? Well its the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. My career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictio

21、ns, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on. 6:15 But in 2021, my path crossed again with the Indus script. Thats when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. And so it

22、was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. And Id like to describe some of the results that we have found. Or better yet, lets all collectively decipher. Are you ready? 6:41 The first thing that you need to do w

23、hen you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. Here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. Can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? Ill give you a couple of seconds. Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. Okay. Left to

24、 right? Oh, its almost 50/50. Okay. The answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, youll notice that theres a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the sign. One of the

25、signs is also below the text on the top. This suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left, and so thats one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. And the Indus script now has this particular property. 7:34 What other proper

26、ties of language does the script show? Languages contain patterns. If I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? Most of you said U, which is right. Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? Now theres severa

27、l thoughts. Theres E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. Theres a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. And this is ve

28、ry similar to a Q and U example. This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. And furthermore, theres some signsthat really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign, and this sign, in fact, happens to

29、be the most frequently occurring sign in the script. 8:24 Given such patterns, here was our idea. The idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which sym

30、bols tend to follow each other. Given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. So we could deliberately erase some symbols,and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. Here are some examples. You may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune.

31、9:04 What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. In the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. Theres also practical use for this particular procedure. Theres a lot of these text

32、s that are damaged. Heres an example of one such text. And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. Heres an example of a symbol that was predicted. And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze. 9:36 Now heres one other thing you can do with the computer model. So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this.