London Calling

No, not the storied 1979 album by the glorious British punk band, The Clash. The real city — the Roman military encampment founded in 43 A.D., grown into one of the greatest capital cities the world — London, England. To Ben, Maddie, and me, it was London calling, and we spent Spring Break exploring the vibrant city on the Thames.

My big Ben face to face (to face to face, if you get the joke) with Big Ben. My princess-acting delight of a daughter in the company of the Queen and the royal court. This Duke acknowledging the courage and accomplishments of the Duke of Marlborough and the Duke of Wellington.

Based in Bloomsbury, we explored many of the museums in the city, with our faves being the British Imperial War Museum and its fantastic exhibits on World War I and World War II, the Natural History Museum and its cathedral-like Central Hall, and the British Museum, with the Elgin Marbles, Egyptian mummies, and the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a stone slab bearing parallel inscriptions, which gave the world the key to the long-forgotten language of ancient Egypt. The first inscription is in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The second is in demotic, the popular language of Egypt at that time when the stone was inscribed. At the bottom of the stone the same message is written again in Greek. By working from the Greek, the Rosetta Stone made possible the decipherment of ancient Egypitian hieroglyphics,

Remind you of Cued Speech and cueing? Decipherment? A key to language acquisition?

The figurative definition of Rosetta Stone is something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem. The critical key to literacy in a language, the ability to read and write, is to understand the phonemes of the language (the sounds of the language). Making visual the spoken phonemes, cueing permits the decryption of the written language, providing deaf cuers with the critical key to understanding the written language.

One speaks a sentence. One cues the spoken sentence to the deaf child. The deaf child understands the sentence and can find the written version of that sentence. Or: the deaf child reads a written sentence. The deaf child uses the knowledge of cues to de-code the language. The deaf child can express by cues or voice the written sentence. The critical key to the process of translation? Cued Speech and cueing.

Cueing. The Rosetta Stone of literacy.