Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy Read Free Book Online Page A

specialisation he did remember from his earlier studies how Champollion succeeded in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, Grotefend the runes on Ancient Persian stones, and how someone recently managed to decrypt the inscriptions of the Maya and the wooden boards of the Easter Islanders. In all these cases the scholars were dealing with items in two or three languages or scripts like the Rosetta Stone or the trove at Persepolis, sometimes with the advantage of earlier, possibly somewhat puzzling, superscriptions that might, however, be deciphered, given enough patience, hard work and a bit of luck. The procedure was much the same in most cases: it was to assume that certain signs or group of signs approximated to certain words, names, or known combinations of sounds, then to look for clusters of such and substitute the assumed meanings until the meanings of others could be inferred to the point that the whole was rendered readable. And yet, even with the aid of the most up-to-date equipment, how many had failed and how often! Furthermore, those who did succeed might have shed decades of bitter tears in the effort. And nowadays of course there were fabulously powerful computers to facilitate the analysis of mountains of data.
    What was he to do then, stuck without any help, all by himself, faced with the unfamiliar script of an unfamiliar language? What assumptions could he make, what range of data should he match up with another when he had nothing to go on, at least nothing so far, and was able to associate neither this or that group of characters with a particular word nor any particular word with any meaning? What set of characters could he try replacing with what? Despite all this he set about writing down all the different characters he could find in the telephone directory, the last page of which happened to be blank. Here he copied them one after the other, as many different ones as he could find in the text. This quiet activity, the rhythm of which resembled that of his normal scholarly process at research stage, had the effect of slowly calming him, restoring his temper, and, for a while, entirely reconciling him to his situation, so that once he had focused his attention on a restricted range of data and the nature of his problem was better defined, he had almost forgotten where he was and how he had got here. He had had such a full meal at the buffet that he never touched the remnant of food on the windowsill though he did uncork his second bottle of wine.
    Once again he concentrated and began to speculate on what kind of alphabet it might be. The characters were extremely simple, consisting of two or three strokes at most, a little like Old Germanic runes or Ancient Sumerian cuneiform, though it seemed odd and rather ridiculous to compare what he was now looking at with those two long-dead scripts. He also noticed a conspicuous lack of diacritics, that there was no distinction between upper- and lower-case letters, at least none in this book, all letters here being of the same typeface and point size. He soon realised that he had noted over one hundred characters and that he was still discovering more. Sipping at the red wine he wondered what that meant and where the information would lead him? Could it be after all that each character was a word, each word a new character and that was why there were so many of them? Or maybe the characters stood for syllables as in ancient Crete and Cyprus? Or perhaps it was a complex system, like the Ancient Egyptian, comprising various elements: words, shorter phonetic clusters and individual phonetic signs in hieroglyphic form? It occurred to him that it might even be a series of combined phonetic symbols, the kind linguists worked with in order to differentiate between subtle levels of meaning and pronunciation. Or perhaps they simply employed a system that represented this particularly wide range of sounds? Questions, questions, nothing but questions! In the meantime, without