What If… The Rosetta Stone Was Wrong?
For some reason, will.i.am’s I Like To Move It is on my Spotify playlist after my daughters demand listening to Meghan Trainor’s Better When I’m Dancin’. I like the song, but I don’t see the connection. One thing gets me every time I listen to it. It sounds like conjugation lessons in any language.
I like to move it, move it
She like to move it, move it
He like to move it, move it
We like to move it!
Except it’s wrong. For third person singular, the correct conjugation of “to like” is “he likes” or “she likes”.
Lyrically, it sounds fine. However, what if in 10,000 years, this is the fragment of English language that gets picked up.
What if the Rosetta stone had errors between hieroglyphs, Egyptian script, and Greek? Would we know if we didn’t have a second source to verify.
Maybe. There could be other patterns that could indicate that this was wrong. Maybe if we were to look at all languages, we could find that there was typically some variation between first and second person singular for the verb “to like”.
The Rosetta Stone provided a big advancement in understanding ancient texts. Future explorers will be able to get by with much less information.
