For instance hieroglyphs or other symbol based languages. How did we find out what those symbols mean, when we’ve got nothing to compare them to?
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Well, there’s two paths. There’s code breaking, and there’s getting REALLY lucky.
For example with Hieroglyphs, the breakthrough with understanding them came with the Rosetta Stone. It was a stone that had a passage carved into it, but that passage was carved into it 3 times in 3 different languages, two that were already understood, and one being hieroglyphs. That gave people an excellent point that start figuring out what hieroglyphs meant, because you could compare them to the known text.
Then there’s what is essentially like code breaking. Any written language is going to have patterns in it, so you can try a series of strategies to try to reveal these patterns by making guesses. Seeing if that guess holds up across multiple texts, then trying again if it doesn’t hold up.
We need something like the Rosetta Stone, a stone that had the same text written in ancient Egyptian, but also in two forms of ancient Greek as well. And since we could compare both forms of Greek and see that the stone had the same text for the two forms of Greek, it was then easy to assume that it also had the same text in Egyptian as well, and we were then able to begin translating by comparing the Egyptian to the Greek.
Without something like that though, we really can’t decipher an extinct language with no modern speakers.
We *do* have stuff to compare them to; we find things that we know are the same text written in two (or more) languages, then we compare. The most famous example is probably the Rosetta stone, a tablet with the same text written in three languages (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek).
Just for day-to-day commerce among various peoples, translations have been a normal thing for thousands of years. Finding them is tricky, not that much survives, but enough exist that we can decipher most extinct languages to some level.
We don’t. If a language has no comparison points we can’t know what it means. There are languages we have no hope of ever knowing.
We know ancient Egyptian specifically because of the Rosetta Stone, a piller that contained the same information in multiple other languages. Others we work back from languages we know to have evolved from them.
Usually by finding translations languages we do know.
You might have heard the term “Rosetta stone”; the Rosetta stone was a great big chunk of rock with some text written on it in three languages. I don’t remember the third language, but one language was Greek and one was Egyptian hieroglyphs. Through a lot of complicated work, workers were able to figure out how Egyptian hieroglyphs work as a language, and from there we were able to determine how the language worked.
People have been talking about languages for a long time.
We know a lot about Latin because nobles would bitch about how commoners would speak Latin incorrectly.
School assignments. Have an ancient language, find a child’s tablet inscription, see what’s wrong or corrected. You know it’s wrong because everyone else writes it a different way. And if someone else rights it a different way, you know that it could be a typo because they sound the same.
Other people have explained how hieroglyphs were deciphered so I’m going to focus on Cuneiform.
It began to be successfully deciphered after German philogists began looking for and find the proper names of ancient Persian shahanshahs in the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis that were known from ancient Greek, Hebrew, and later Sassanid Persian sources. (I’m talking about men like Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes, BTW…)
Georg Friedrich Grotefen then suggested that since that the Sassanid shahanshahs’ standard method of address in inscriptions was “(Name), great king, king of kings, son of (Father’s Name)” then perhaps the Achaemenid shahanshahs had used that form as well. As it turns out, he was right, though his work was not immediately accepted and in some respects, he did make mistakes in his attempted deciphering.
The later French scholar Eugène Burnouf used a similar method to decipher a list of Darius the Great’s satrapies.
Meanwhile, in 1835, a man named Henry Rawlinson rediscovered the Behistun Inscription near Kermanshah that had three identical texts carved into it in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite, which was to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to hieroglyphs.
It certainly helped, however, that Akkadian and Old Persian both belong to very well understood language families, the Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European families. Transcribing Elamite or Sumerian (both of which are long-extinct language isolates) would have been very difficult, if not impossible, had there not also been cuneiform used to write Akkadian or Old Persian.
If there’s really truly nothing, then it remains opaque. But often we have something to work with; maybe we do know some languages which were spoken in the area and can try guesses about whether this is an alternate alphabet for a language we do already know. Or sometimes we have a few symbols from some native speaker who wrote down something in the presence of a person who knew another language and is able to give a starting point.
Here’s an documentary about how they deciphered Mayan:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496253/
And here’s a book about the decipherment of Linear-B:
*The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code*, by Margalit Fox
First of all, it’s important to distinguish between languages and writing systems. Many languages don’t have a writing system, and some have more than one.
For writing systems to be deciphered, you really do need something to compare them to – either a similar writing system, or contextual clues that can tell you what some of the text means. For example, take Linear B. People could tell from its overall structure, comparing it to other known writing systems, that each letter represented a specific syllable. Then they noticed that some words seemed to be specific to tablets from certain locations. They then started making educated guesses that these words represented known place names. When they made the correct guesses, everything else started falling into place like in one of those codeword puzzles, as many of the other words became recognisable as known Ancient Greek words.
In contrast, a similar writing system from the same region, called Linear A, is still completely undeciphered.
If you don’t have a writing system, the main thing you can do is called comparative reconstruction, where you compare languages that are both descended from the same ancient language, notice things they have in common and reconstruct a rough estimate of what the ancient language must have been like. For example, there is a large class of languages, mostly from Europe and India, called the Indo-European languages (including English, French, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, etc.), which have so many similarities that they evidently have a common origin. Linguists have been able to look at the differences and similarities between these languages to piece together a very rough approximation of an ancient language called Proto-Indo-European, even though no writing has survived from this language and nobody is even exactly sure where its speakers lived.
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