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.
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