How do linguists go about translating a forgotten language? How does that work when there’s no one left to help?
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the number one method is when we find a bilingual text that has both the unknown language and a language we do know. we can use that to figure out how the unknown language worked.
sometimes we can also use artifacts. like if we find an ancient jar with an unknown label on it, and it has say, grape remains in it, we can guess that the label meant “grapes”, and if we have a lot of artifacts like this, we can start trying to piece the language together. some of our knowledge of etruscan was built like this.
in other cases, while the language has been forgotten, it’s a direct ancestor of living languages, and we can make good guesses about what it means by using what we call the comparative method to reconstruct what the words in the older language mean.
often we combine all of these.
like with ancient egyptian, we used the rosetta stone to figure out the writing system, but we also had to reference the coptic language, since coptic is the modern descendent of ancient egyptian.
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