How do linguists understand ancient/dead languages?
In: Other
For some like Latin while the native populations stopped using it as their primary tongues, thus causing it to be classified as a dead language, specific groups continued to use it. For Latin these groups were the Catholic Church, and Academic Scholars.
For others like Ancient Greek they utilize modern variants to reconstruct how the ancient language functioned.
For those like Egyptian Hieroglyphics they use writings such as the Roseta Stone that have the same information in multiple languages, at least one of which they already know to decipher those that they do not.
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