How archaeologists decipher languages that don’t exist anymore?
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Often they can’t, and there are many languages that we simply will never be able to understand. However, if the language is similar to one we do understand today, we can use that as a way to try and figure out what they meant. But if it is a written language that is significantly different from other ones in the region, and no one is still alive who speaks it, we just are out of luck.
… and sometimes they are just very very lucky. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
you should look up the rosetta stone. super interesting. the short version is that it had the same message written on it in different languages which helped those languages be read.
The key is often the discovery of an ancient translation. Thus the famous Rosetta Stone is inscribed with the same text in three scripts – Demotic, hieroglyphic and Greek. This was the key to deciphering the hieroglyphic script.
Look for any kinda artefacts that has things written in multiple languages and try to match the texts. Rosetta Stone was the artefact that unlocked the Egyptian hieroglyphs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
Very poorly. It’s best when you have a text with some similar words or a text which is understood because the same story has been passed down orally along with the text. From this you might be able to identify certain things. Like a kings name for example. Then you can assume the word for king if it always comes before that name. You can take letters and apply them to other words and you start to get an alphabet. Then words and so on.
Often this is impossible because the ancient language you are trying to decipher was only from a small area a few thousand years ago. Maybe only ten thousand people could speak it and it could have been a secondary language. If the people died out or were taken over by a larger community a new language would be adapted. Give it a few generations and no one has any idea what they hell their ancestors wrote.
Add to the fact people didn’t travel as far in the past and rarely learned other languages beyond conversational outside of a few professions/classes. A lot gets lost quickly. Anything written down was also written by an educated person who were far fewer in the past. If only a hundred people in your city could write and the Mongols strolled through any tablets would just be gibberish.
You take everything you know so far about the language and the text you’re looking at. Then you look at an unknown bit of the text and have an educated guess at what it might mean or what it’s doing in the sentence. Then you take that guess and see if it still makes sense if you apply it everywhere. Rinse and repeat.
If the text you’re looking at is a translation of another text in a known language then that’s great because there are far fewer possibilities to choose from with each word. But there are other ways too.
Bedřich Hrozný was trying to decipher Hittite. The text he had before him contained this sentence:
> nu NINDA-an ezzatteni watar-ma ekutteni
There were some things he already knew. Someone before him had already [guessed](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language#Decipherment) that Hittite was an Indo-European language. Also the cuneiform writing system inherited some logograms from Sumerian that contained clues about meanings, a bit like Chinese.
So armed with this knowledge, Hrozný made some [educated guesses](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed%C5%99ich_Hrozn%C3%BD#Deciphering_of_the_Hittite_language):
> It was known at that time that the ideogram for NINDA meant bread in Sumerian. Hrozný thought that the suffix -an was perhaps the Hittite accusative. Then, he assumed that the second word, ed-/-ezza, had something to do with the bread and assumed that it could be the verb to eat. The comparison with the Latin edo, the English eat and the German essen led to the assumption that NINDA-an ezzatteni means “you will eat bread”. In the second sentence, Hrozný was struck by the word watar that has similarities to the English water and German Wasser. The last word of the second sentence, ekutteni, had the stem eku-, which seemed to resemble the Latin aqua (water). So, he translated the second sentence as “you will drink water”.
When he took these guesses and applied them elsewhere they made sense. Sometimes they enabled him to understand enough of a sentence to make more guesses, and those made sense everywhere too, and so on.
Often, they search for patterns in the language. Certain rules apply to this method. Sometimes, they have a general idea what the text is about and applying these rules can help them make a breakthrough on the language.
If you really want to know, check out this YouTube video. It’s about how they deciphered Mayan writing which is very interesting but begins with a good discussion on how they decipher any old language. The story of how we learned the sound of the Mayan language is quite amazing.
All language has patterns to it, scientists can use those patterns to guess at translations until one of them works.
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