How do linguists understand ancient/dead languages?
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It’s sort of a sliding scale really. On it’s own a dead language is simply a language that no longer has a community that uses it as their primary language. That doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about it.
For instance, nobody speaks Latin as their primary language. We know perfectly well how to read and write Latin and we still teach it. On top of that, many modern languages like French, Italian and Spanish have their roots in Latin.
The fact that languages relate to each other also means that we can often work backwards from contemporary languages. After all, languages are systems for communication. They have patterns, rules, structure. Linguists can work backwards from what we know to try and figure out the rules for what we don’t know.
Biblical Hebrew is closely related to modern Hebrew for instance. It was relatively easy for scholars to work backwards and figure out ancient Hebrew.
For the really ancient stuff, we often discovered a jumping point that helped us. The famous Rosetta stone was engraved with the same text in Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphics. Since we knew Greek, this stone was incredibly helpful in figuring out how Demotic and Hieroglyphics could be deciphered.
Along the same lines, the Behistun Inscription depicted the same text in old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. This inscription helped us make a massive leap in understanding cuniform writing.
Learning dead languages is basically a decoding challenge. You work from what you have to decipher what you don’t know. It’s extremely difficult if you don’t have a starting point but for many languages, we either have contemporary descending languages or helpful touchstones like the Rosetta stone or the Behistun inscription.
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