Lost Languages

by P.E. Cleator

Voices from the past

From the hieroglyphs of Egypt to the pictographs of Easter Island, P. E. Cleator studies the languages of ancient civilizations. Step by step he traces the archaeological discoveries and tells how cryptologists carefully decipher their messages from the buried past.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Linguistics

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Philip Ellaby Cleator, founder of the British Interplanetary Society, was born in the town of Wallasey, Cheshire, on 7th June 1908, the son of a structural design engineer.

Reviews

[Cindy Dyson Eitelman · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a shock to find a book published in 1959 with a writing style I'd thought disappeared in the last century!  Just listen to this:

    Inasmuch as the active application of language is speech, it is upon speech that writing, essentially a secondary means of communication, is dependent.

I got what he was saying--after a, "Huh? Back up, there," moment.  When I went on to finish the paragraph, what he was saying made sense--basically this:  While written language is cool, it ain't shucks to spoken language. 

First line of book, by the way.  I should have ran away screaming.

But when you get used to the style, it's like poetry.  Phrases like, "...though this did not preclude them from acquiring other wives as well."  Why not, "...stop them from taking"?  Because it's style!

I just hope I'm not talking like that when I finish reading it.   Or in other words, "I am fearful, but beg the apprehension may be ungrounded, that my own oral language will soon acquire the characteristics of the author's pedological one."

Now that's out of my system.  I have to decline to write a meaningful review.  The subject matter was way out of my league.  I couldn't begin to guess if it was accurate or just pure baloney, but all signs indicated accuracy, completeness, and comprehensiveness.  I did gain an appreciation for the difficulty scholars face--if the language is known but the script unknown, or the script known but the language unknown, deciphering is hard enough.  But how about tackling an inscription of language unknown  and script unknown?  Fun, indeed.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another entry on my lingua obscura shelf.

[Gabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, particularly the section on cuneiform. In-depth enough to be interesting but still accessible to the common reader.