Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
Six sepulchral inscriptions have been found, either in Athens itself or at the Piraeus, five of them bilingual, which mark the interment in Attic soil of persons whose nationality was Phoenician. They had monuments erected over them, generally of some pretension, which must have obtained as much respect as the native tombstones, since otherwise they could not have endured to our day.
Perhaps some day the debt will be fully repaid by the discovery of a bilingual text in Egyptian and Minoan, giving us in hieroglyphics a version of some passage of that Minoan script which now exists only to tantalize us with records of an ancient history which we cannot read. Such a discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility.
The time heralds its approach, when the Roman commonwealth will pass into a bilingual state and the true heir of the throne and the ideas of Alexander the Great will arise in the west, at once a Roman and a Greek.
As yet, in spite of all efforts, it has not proved possible to decipher the inscriptions, for there has so far been no such good fortune as the discovery of a bilingual inscription to do for Minoan what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Everybody is bilingual, speaking, if not both English and French, either one or other of these languages and the formless Angliche patois invented by Tommy and his hosts of the occupied zone. And everybody, soldier and civilian, treats as a matter of course the strange metamorphosis of what was formerly a haven for the gentle tourist.
Not a few of these merchants were Uighurs and Mohammedans; many Uighurs were also employed as clerks, as the Mongols were very often unable to read and write Chinese, and the government offices were bilingual, working in Mongolian and Chinese. The clever Uighurs quickly learned enough of both languages for official purposes, and made themselves indispensable assistants to the Mongols.
Their father was the founder of a library enriched by his care with the best specimens of early printing and a few rare MSS. In the latter class he possessed an ancient bilingual copy of St. Paul's Epistles, a Livy in uncial characters, and the precious fragments of the Vatican Virgil, which he gave to Fulvio Orsini in his lifetime.
Austria, traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an uncertain, bilingual phrase.
It is true that Palestine was, to some extent, a bilingual country, like Wales, one writer suggests, where the English and the Welsh languages are now freely spoken, that Aramaic and Greek were used indifferently. I can hardly imagine that a people as tenacious of their own institutions as the Jews could have adopted Greek as generally as the Welsh have adopted the English tongue.
As the boy was born into a bilingual Graeco-Roman world, of which the Greeks were the only cultured people, this might seem natural and inevitable; but we know that in his heart the Roman despised the Greek. Of witnesses in their favour we might expect Cicero to be the strongest, but Cicero occasionally lets us know what he really thinks of their moral character.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking