How archaeologists decipher languages that don’t exist anymore?
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not an ancient language but i found a paragraph written in random symbols by one of my family member years ago and I wanna decipher it now but don’t have a single clue where to begin..
Linguists estimate about 100,000 languages have been spoken in human history. Most languages were never written and only spoken. Almost all of these languages are extinct and will forever be unknown to linguistics. There are between 6000-7000 languages spoken today. The variance depends on which dialects you consider to be languages. Either way, 90% of the remaining languages will become extinct within our lifetimes. There is a race to document them among academics.
Only a small number of languages were spoken in societies that independently developed writing systems. There are only a few dozen known writing systems (latin, arabic, chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, etc). It’s unlikely that there are more than a few undiscovered writing systems. If you develop the ability to write, you will necessarily leave artifacts of the writing. Since there are so few writing systems and not far off 2,000 written languages, almost all written languages were first spoken languages that later adopted a writing system that had already been created and established. In order to do that, the speakers had to learn the at least one language that uses the writing system! Even the forgotten ones are relatively easy to decipher.
There are only a handful of undeciphered writing systems. The number is in the order of a dozen or so, with the exact number up for debate on whether it’s art or a writing system. Without a trove of written artifacts or a translation to a known language, these will remain forever undeciphered.
The story of how exceptionally well preserved extinct writing systems like Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform were deciphered will probably be discussed here. Those cultures had to encounter cultures with a known and well understood writing system. In cases where that didn’t happen, it’s just speculation.
Apart from all that has already been said, I recommend Irving Finkel’s talk: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=PfYYraMgiBA
A delight to watch.
this is something they are doing today actively with the Burma language Pyu
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyu_language_(Sino-Tibetan)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyu_language_(Sino-Tibetan))
(i know one of the researchers doing the work)
it is beyond esoteric stuff and i am in awe of what these people can figure out
[https://www.persee.fr/doc/befeo_0336-1519_2017_num_103_1_6247](https://www.persee.fr/doc/befeo_0336-1519_2017_num_103_1_6247)
To piggyback on this, how do archeologists resist the urge to just make something up, because who’s going to know enough to call them on it?
Using up the information available, is this printed on a certain item? Is it printed on multiple of those same items? or just that one? If it’s just that one, is it a name? Can you tell if there are signs of punctuation and other notes that one can put together to make an educated decision? And you do this along the line until you can figure out enough words that you can make educated guesses about what the other symbols might have meant, though the pronunciation of it all is much harder to put together without help.
The decipherment of [Linear B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B) is a great example. The book about it by John Chadwick is out of print, but if you can find a copy it’s very interesting, and detailed.
I had a friend learning Aramaic, he said that one of the ways they learned the sounds based on children’s stone tablet homework. They would have typos, like writing their instead of there. If that typo is common enough, you know the two words sound the same.
All language has patterns to it, scientists can use those patterns to guess at translations until one of them works.
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.
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