Ex. The Iliad was said to have been written in around 7 BC before the creation of the modern Latin alphabet. How did we, for example, decipher and give the word “Trojans” to name the people who were fighting off the Greek armies? Is it just some word we made up and then assigned?
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Translators have been a thing ever since the origin of trade. If you were engaging in commerce with people who spoke a different language than you did, you needed a way to communicate. Many of the translators wrote translations down, or wrote documents in two languages for various purposes and those documents allow for a foundation to build modern translations.
For example, if a man who speaks greek is selling to a man who speaks latin, the manifest of the shipment will likely need the name of the goods written in _both_ languages so both men understand what is being traded. If you speak greek but not latin, reading that document will help you learn a few latin words.
Take for example the famous Rosetta Stone. It was a written decree from the Egyptian priests that was deemed so important that it was written identically in _three_ languages on the stone. One of those languages was ancient hieroglyphics which we could not read, but another was ancient greek which we _could_ read. That document allowed us to determine what the hieroglyphics at the top said and gave us the beginnings of translation.
From there, you just begin filling in the rest from context clues and other historical documents.
Well in most cases with ancient languages there isn’t very much deciphering really necessary. The Iliad was written before the development of the modern Latin alphabet, but there were earlier alphabets available at the time. The Romans knew how to spell “Troia” in Latin and knew how to pronounce it, because many of them knew how to spell and pronounce “Τροία” in greek. And the Greeks knew that that city had been called such likely because that’s what the local people called it – there are Hittite records of a settlement called “truwisa”. And if the scribes who were copying *The Iliad* were ever unsure of how to pronounce Troia, they could consult a Greek grammar book, which had been around then for centuries.
So what that example illustrates is that there really just has been a continuity of knowledge going back all the way. The (maybe slightly boring) answer that for most stuff, no deciphering or assigning of names was ever necessary, people have just known the whole time
There’s a fantastic book by Eleanor Dickey called “Learning Latin the Ancient Way.” It reproduces excerpts from ancient textbooks that were used to teach Greek-speaking non-Romans how to speak Latin and live in Roman cities. Based on those texts and other ancient documents, we can see how people who spoke both languages would express an idea from one language in the other. Those ancient translations may not have included the word “Trojan” specifically, but they do contain enough other proper nouns that we can learn about how proper nouns were transliterated into a different alphabet and were likely pronounced.
The modern Latin alphabet did not exist in 7 BC. The Classical Latin alphabet did exist. It added Y and Z Old Latin alphabet that had existed since the 6th century BC.
To reach the Latin alphabet that English uses you need to add J, U, and W. So it is extremely few changes the last 2000 years. Look at [https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.XXX.0030290.7055475/917121.jpg](https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.XXX.0030290.7055475/917121.jpg) that is 1st century BC Latin inscription. It is not hard at all to read the letter if you can read this post. You might not understand it because you do not know Latins but the script is not a problem.
7 BC also have very little to do with the Illiad, it is probably from 8th or early 7th century BC so centuries earlier. It was in Greek and use the Greek, not the Latin alphabet. We know how the Greek alphabet has cahnged from it inception in the 9th century BC to today
The older know manuscript of it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetus_A that is written in the 10th century AD in Greek. So exactly how stiff was written in 7 BC or 7th century BC is not relevant because it is a copy that is a lot later.
Greek and Latin are languages that were used in ancient times and then disappeared. There has been continual usage and they have changed a bit over time. There is not anyone today that has Latin as the native language but is has been the language of the catholic church, the change to church service in local languages was in the 1960s.
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