How archaeologists decipher languages that don’t exist anymore?
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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.
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