| 释义 |
Rosetta stone|rəʊˈzɛtə stəʊn|
[The name of a celebrated stone, bearing a trilingual inscription dating from the 2nd c. B.C., found in 1799 near Rosetta in Egypt.
The stone, now in the British Museum, bears an inscription in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphics; the decipherment of the latter two parts of the inscription by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 led to the interpretation of all the other early records of the Egyptian civilization.]
Used transf. and fig. of something that resembles the Rosetta stone, usu. by acting as a key to some previously unattainable understanding (in quot. 1969, something indecipherable).
1902Encycl. Brit. XXVI. 721/2 Although not the Rosetta stone which enabled him to decipher the minute structure of glucose and its congeners, this compound made possible for the first time the separation and identification of such compounds. 1933H. G. Wells Shape of Things to Come 24 About a third of the shorthand stuff was already represented by longhand or typescript copy in the folders. That was my Rosetta Stone. 1969R. Lowell Notebk. 1967–68 102 The typescript looked like a Rosetta Stone. 1975New Yorker 29 Sept. 29/1 A knowledge of accounting is a kind of Rosetta stone. 1979Sci. Amer. Mar. 72/1 The spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proved to be the Rosetta stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much else could also be understood. |