News broke in July 2015 that the Rosetta mission’s Philae lander had discovered 16 ‘carbon and nitrogen-rich’ organic compounds on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The news sparked renewed debates about whether the ‘prebiotic’ chemicals required for producing amino acids and nucleotides – the essential building blocks of all life forms – may have been delivered to Earth by cometary impacts.
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For some people, recent images of the Rosetta space program have been slightly disappointing. We expected to see the nucleus of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet as a brilliantly shining body. Instead, images from Rosetta are as black as a lump of coal. Galileo Galilei would be among those not to share this sense of disappointment.
The post From Galileo to Rosetta appeared first on OUPblog.
This Day in World History - On September 27, 1822, Jean François Champollion announced a long-awaited discovery: he could decipher the Rosetta Stone. The stone, a document written in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V, had been discovered in Rashid (Rosetta in French), Egypt in 1799 by French troops involved in a military campaign against the British. Deciphering hieroglyphics had frustrated scholars for centuries. Arab scholars, beginning in the ninth century, CE, made unsuccessful attempts, as did Europeans in the fifteenth.
It seems like a no-brainer, but books written for children, teaching them the grammar and vocabulary of their own language, are also great for adults learning a new language. My Italian teacher confessed that a major component of her own Italian education was independent reading of Comic Books!
I have already suggested parents look over the books offered at the Rosetta Project, but what I should have realized (with a name like Rosetta) was that many of these books are offered in multiple languages. What is great about this is that you can compare the English side-by-side with another language, like so:
“Once upon a time, there were four little Rabbits, and their names were- Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.”
Italian: C’erano una volta quattro piccoli coniglietti che si chiamavano Flopsy, Mopsy, Coda di cotone e Peter.
German: Es waren einmal vier kleine Hasen, die hiessen Flopsi, Mopsi, Wollschwanz, und Peter.
Romanian: Odata demult, erau patru iepurasi si se numeau: Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, si Peter.
I learned that ”SI” means “AND” in Romanian! Amazing. Foreign children’s books are fun little puzzles and can be delightfully weird. In Italian class we read a book about a naughty boy whose “culetto” (little butt) was so fed up with him being spanked all the time, that it packed up a suitcase and moved away.
Have fun learning a new language! It’s not just for kids.
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