Edit: I mean decipher. Sorry for any misunderstanding.
In: 2
Either A: wild guess/make it up.
Or B: compare to languages we know. Hopefully there are records from a time people spoke both languages which detail pronunciation and such, but that’s not always available.
By looking at things like loaned words, spelling changes, music and poetry, or comments from other people we can reconstruct what a language sounded like.
What do you mean by ‘depict’? ‘Decipher’? ‘Reconstruct’? Those are quite different questions!
Decipherment is done by using bilingual texts and transcriptions of personal names, with reference to related languages if there’s any known or suspected to be related. Reconstruction is done by comparing modern descendant languages (and attested older forms when available) and seeing how the differences between them could have developed through natural language change.
Last time I checked, it is either much more comparison and based guess work. It’ll be a bad example, but take Old Latin for example. Spanish and Italian are both “new” forms of Old Latin. Linguists take these languages, compare them and try to essentially guess the meaning and translate the meaning of a Old Latin “document, because ES/IT words have a resemblence to Old Latin equivalent words.
Well, usually there is a corpus of work, and a lot of ancient languages are related to modern ones, so you can start to piece together what individual words might mean and go from there.
If you are very lucky, you will have access to an out-and-out translation between a known language and unknown, an equivalent body of text in two languages. This is what happened with the famous “Rosetta Stone”, which had the same proclomation written in two forms of Ancient Egyptian as well as Ancient Greek. Scholars at the time didn’t know how to decode Ancient Egyptian, but Ancient Greek had been well-studied for centuries.
You can also “reconstruct” a language surprisingly well with the comparative method, given enough of its descendants. This is how we know the likely pronunciations of things in PIE, or Proto-indo-european, an ancient unattested language initially reconstructed from Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin. We know this works to some degree, because you can use this method on the Romance languages and get something that pretty strongly resembles Late Vulgar Latin.
It is worth noting that sometimes we don’t, though. Things like Linear A, Cypro-Minoan, the Kretan Heiroglyphs… we still don’t understand all the intricacies of the Quipu system used by the pre-conquest Inca. There are plenty of times historians and linguists DON’T figure it out, those are just less interesting stories.
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