How do linguists go about translating a forgotten language? How does that work when there’s no one left to help?
In: 4
Theres many ways. If youre lucky, you might have a copy of a document in a known and an unknown language. If not, you could go about it linguistically. Most languages are member of a language family (which is why, for instance, french, italian, spanish, and romanian all sound similar), and with enough time, you can reconstruct what an extinct language would have sounded like, what grammar it had, etc. and you can then use this information to figure out how it might have been written, and so on. A lot of it is speculative though, and sometimes it takes centuries. For instance, due to some of the quirks of the mayan writing system, it took us until the 1980s to decipher it. Theres actually a video by Ancient Americas on how we did it. https://youtu.be/YvLs3gDLCOI
Latest Answers