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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In some cases we literally can’t. So much information about the culture ancient Greece would have considered ancient Greece is lost because they wrote everything down in Linear A, which we haven’t managed to crack yet.
One big script on one of the wall inside of a pyramid, was translated in 3 languages. Since we knew the signification of some parts of some of these languages, they have been able to make cross reference and translate everything. Some very old book have been written in more that one language too. That way, they can learn a lot.
Not as old as hieroglyphics, but the Mediæval Bæbes sing in Middle English, and their pronunciations are/were controversial. Some language scholars were offended that they dared pronounce words that no one actually knew the pronunciation for, while others were delighted that the language was coming alive. They throw Latin in as well. So sometimes it might just be a good guess.
Here is one [of my favorite songs of theirs on YouTube ](https://youtu.be/BNTeJIJ0vgg) to give you a flavor, if you’re interested.
Many extinct languages were never truly extinct. They often changed over time to child languages, or are only used in religious or formal settings. And they also may have related languages which we know about or are still spoken. From related languages, we can work out how the language worked by comparing all the differences between them and deciding which was the most likely version in the extinct language.
Or we can find examples of the language being used alongside another language. This might be a direct translation or it might be that one language is being used to explain terms in the other language (for example a lot of old Latin texts have “glosses” or rough translations/explanations in the margins). From these we can work out what individual words or phrases mean.
Or sometimes place names or borrowed words still exist in other languages. So if you have a lot of place names near a river with a certain word or sound in it, you can work out the word for “river” in the extinct language. Once you have enough examples, you can just start filling in the gaps from the language itself. Also, you can use clues like poetry to work out likely pronunciations of words if this isn’t obvious from the spelling.
However, there are lots of extinct languages where we don’t know very much about them and we only know a few words or phrases, or we know how to read words but we don’t know how they were pronounced. For some languages, we’ve only guessed what they looked like from comparing child languages, but we don’t really know for sure.
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