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In the same year de Sacy gave a copy of the stone's inscriptions to a former student of his, [[Johan David Åkerblad]], a Swedish diplomat and amateur linguist. Åkerblad had greater success, analysing the same sign-groups as de Sacy but identifying more signs correctly.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=47–51}} In his letters to de Sacy Åkerblad proposed an alphabet of 29 demotic signs, half of which were later proven correct, and based on his knowledge of Coptic identified several demotic words within the text.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=110}} De Sacy was sceptical of his results, and Åkerblad too gave up.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=47–51}} Despite attempts by other scholars, little further progress was made until more than a decade later, when [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] entered the field.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=111}}
[[File:Thomas Young by Briggs.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|[[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] in 1822, in a portrait by [[Henry Perronet Briggs]]]]
Young was a British [[polymath]] whose fields of expertise included physics, medicine and linguistics. By the time he turned his attention to Egypt he was regarded as one of the foremost intellectuals of the day.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=111}} In 1814 he began corresponding with de Sacy about the Rosetta Stone, and after some months he produced what he called translations of the hieroglyphic and demotic texts of the stone. They were in fact attempts to break the texts down into groups of signs to find areas where the Egyptian text was most likely to closely match the Greek. This approach was of limited use because the three texts were not exact translations of each other.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=121–122}}{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}} Young spent months copying other Egyptian texts, which enabled him to see patterns in them that others missed.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=155–156}} Like Zoëga, he recognised that there were too few hieroglyphs for each to represent one word, and he suggested that words were composed of two or three hieroglyphs each.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}}
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