Okay, how do people reconstruct dead languages in the way they are spoken? I know that for physical archeological artifacts, you can reconstruct them, but for languages? How do people reconstruct a dead language in terms of how they are spoken and what they sound like?
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All writing systems are phonetic. Metrical poetry, homophones, loan words, where rhyme is intended, puns, variations over time (languages tend to change in regular ways) all give clues.
Also, languages tend to employ certain selections of consonants and vowels. How far you get depends in part on the writing system – ancient Egyptian wrote only the consonants, which makes the vowels guesswork, but Sumerian had a fuller writing system.
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