how did we get to understand any extinct languages?

Question

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?

In: 153

Answer 1

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.