"Women have always been considered as the weaker section of the society. They were never given the opportunities to grow and develop equally alongside men."
Throughout the history of mankind, it was always the men who were remembered for their knowl...
THE team had worked for a long time to decode the language. The linguists had arrived there two months ago when they had been informed that the Tanjavur Saraswati Mahal library had received a rare script donated by a well known librarian , which was in a language nobody had ever seen .The archeology department had hired three well known linguists and archaeologists to decode the script.
The Saraswati mahal library is located in Thanjavur .It is one of the oldest libraries in Asia established in the 16th century by the Nayak Kings. This was further developed by the Marathas. Among them was Serfoji who sent pundits all over India to collect, buy, copy number of available renowned works in all of India. Rare palm leaf scripts have been preserved here.
Two months of efforts of decoding the script had not been successful .Today as they were continuing with the attempts , there was loud clapping sound as Prof Joshi , a senior linguist and archaeologist,got a breakthrough. The computer started to make sense of the letters of the script . This was a joyous moment for the three linguists.This was a momentous occasion for Gargi, one among the three archaeologists, who was also a student of Prof .Joshi and had in depth knowledge of languages. She was fascinated with the process of decoding and since, this was the first time she had been a part of the journey of decoding an unknown language, requested Prof .Joshi to explain the techniques of decoding the unknown script.
Prof .Dr. Joshi was a renowned archaeologist ,who specialised in ancient languages. He was heading this team as his expertise was needed for this task. On Gargi's request Prof Joshi started explaining the process of decoding a language. Dr. Joshi asked, "have you heard of the Rosetta stone?'Gargi nodded, and the professor continued,' for more than thousand years historians were puzzled with the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Nobody knew the meaning of the writing on the pyramids and ancient structures. One of the Napoleon soldiers in the 18th century found a stone with inscriptions on it while repairing fort Julien in Rosetts, Egypt. This contained inscriptions in three different languages, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian and ancient Greek. This unlocked the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Cuneiform script was uncovered using Behistun inscriptions.
Today it is easy task as all the information nowadays comes in the form of a computer software. It is easy to compare unknown languages with known scripts and decipher the language. In 2010, Ugaritic became the first language to be decoded by a computer.
Closer home we have the Brahmi script ,Sanskrit, Pali which have been decoded .The Bhattiparlu inscriptions , which is the Rosetta stone for Tamil Brahmi, have helped us to decode Tamil Brahmi. As you know ,there are a number of variations of Tamil Brahmi."
'Now, I have scanned the tadapatra leaves, fedthis into the computer with a few instructions. The computer will decode therest and we will have the English translation of the script. Few basics which Ihave identified. Look at the first alphabet
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In India,people start writing after writing Shri' or "Om". This has been a practice forages and this probably is "Shri" because in Devanagari script it is writtenas श्री, In Tamil it is written as ஸ்ரீ. Theabove letter is a combination of both Devanagari and Tamil. The entire scriptis probably a mixof Brahmi, Pali, Tamil Brahmi and Sanskrit. The possibility of finding such ascript is a place where north meets the South that is Central India, Vidarbha, South of the vindhyas
This computer has been programmed with Brahmi, Tamil Brahmi, Sanskrit and Devanagari script along with meanings of numerous words in the dictionary. The computer will compare the scripts with the tadapatra scripts .This software can also mix and match various scripts if need be and decode and to give the meaning of the words in English, that is to say we will have English translation of the text in sometime.Let us understand that this will be rough translation,but in the days to come we can study more of the language and try to gain more knowledge of the content in the tadapatra leaves.'
All of them waited restlessly as the computer started printing the translated text . The moment the entire text was printed Gargi eagerly took the printout and started reading zealously.
