Yes, we were able to determine the Egyptian symbols/words specifically used on the Rosetta Stone, as well as get the gist of the grammatical structure.
But how did/do we determine the meaning of all the other symbols/words/grammar not used on the Stone?
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The Rosetta stone gives you a partial dictionary through direct comparison of the texts.
When you come to translate a different passage, this lets us translate a certain amount of a text from what we know, but it leaves gaps. These gaps we can start to fill in from contextual clues – by reading what comes before and after we can often accurately guess the missing word. We can also compare texts to the details we do know about places, people and history to fill in a few more gaps – so if we know a city fell in a certain year and see reference to that, we can fill in a few more blanks with details we know.
We can then compare different texts we have partially completed to fill in further gaps and narrow down word choice – a specific word may be very obvious when in the context of one passage, but unclear when it was used in another document, so by sitting down with multiple half completed documents we can start to build up our dictionary and complete more of each document – which gives us more contextual clues for missing words and so on.
It isn’t perfect – things like grammar and meaning can vary wildly, and sometimes we do just have to make a best estimate for certain details we can’t pin down accurately, but it gives us a lot more information to work with which can be a great help.
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