Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics.
设想你就是商博良，你正在检视着一叠写满了古埃及象形文字的纸莎草纸。
Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw.
这时，你遇上一个图案，画的是一个男人拿着一把锯子。
"Very well," you would say, "that means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree."
你会说：“好啊，它的意思当然是指一个农夫拿着锯子出去伐木。”
Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of eighty-two.
然后，你又看另一张纸。它讲的是一位皇后在82岁高龄时死去的故事。
In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the man with the saw.
在句子中间，你再次看见了这个男人拿着一把锯子的图像。
Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But what?
82岁的皇后当然不会去做伐木之类的事情。这个图像肯定代表着别的意思。可到底是什么意思呢？
That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved.
这就是被那位法国人解决的谜。
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call "phonetic writing"
这就是法国人商搏良最终为我们揭示的谜底。
a system of characters which reproduce the "sound" (or phone) of the spoken word
他发现，古埃及人是第一个运用了“语音文字”的人。
and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pothooks.
这种文字再现了口语单词的声音，凭着一些点、划、撇、捺，它让我们能够把所有的口头语言都以书面的形式记录下来。
Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw.
让我们回到一个男人拿着—把锯子的图案上。“锯”（saw）这个单词，
The word "saw" either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb "to see."
它一方面意味着你在木工店看见的一件工具，另一方面，它又代表动词“看”（to see）的过去时。
This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries.
这个单词在古埃及是这样变化的：
First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented.
首先，它只代表着图案中特定的工具“锯子”。
Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a verb.
后来, 这个意义逐渐失去了，它变成了一个动词过去时。