1) How do people translate ancient languages which no one in the world speaks like Rosetta, Egyptian, etc
2) if we came across some text from an alien civilization, by text I mean any visual patterns made by the aliens which they used for sharing information among each other, how will we deciper it? How much alien text will we need to completely deciper it?
Thanks
In: Engineering
They find texts that are in multiple languages and can cross reference. This is how Egyptian hieroglyphes were translated via the Rosetta stone.
Otherwise they can compare to related languages, or find contextual hints as to the usage of certain languages, if available.
In the case of an Alien language, if there is absolutely no relationship between it and Earth language, no contextual hints to at least be able to tell SOME words…. it might be impossible.
Consider that we are only starting to SORT OF understand how whales communicate, and they are on this planet, readilly available to be studied.
1. Reference to a known language is used to decipher an unknown language. A classic of this is the breaking of the Maya written language, which hinged on a collection of details that independently told us little but together allowed for the language to be deciphered. These included a Catholic priest who unwittingly collected evidence the Maya language is phonetic, and modern scholars who thought to compare and cross reference with modern Maya speakers. All combined, these allowed the Maya script to be cracked and we could read their monuments.
2. Patterns alone aren’t enough. If you have no cross reference and nothing to compare, you’re kind of out of luck. Examples of this would be the the Indus Valley Script and Olmec Script. Both of these writings have nothing thus far we can compare or reference them against, so they’re just signs and symbols that look like writing but we have no ability to decipher.
Rosetta isn’t a language, but a chunk of rock with the same text written on it in three languages.
Think of it like seeing signs on a wall written in English, Arabic, and Spanish for tourists. If you only know English, once you realize from the similarities that Spanish has to English that it seems to be the same text, just translated, then you have a pretty good start at translating the far more foreign-to-you Arabic.
Similarly, we’ve had a fair working knowledge of Ancient Greek for a while, from the modern day language and historical record and use and scholarly study over centuries. The Rosetta Stone included that as one of the languages, and the other two are variants of writing Ancient Egyptian. Given the theory that the text was the same, that gave a solid beginning for scholars to begin to unravel the language.
As for alien language, well, many science fiction books have been written on many theories of how aliens might communicate. Sight? Smell? Color? Electric currents shared by touch? All we can really do is speculate based on our own difficulties communicating with each other, despite our shared ancestry and capabilities.
1. It depends a lot on context and the nature of the given language. In the Rosetta Stone example for a certain Egyptian hieroglyphic script, the discovery that helped fill in a lot of blanks and gave us a good start was the same passage of text written in three languages, including an Ancient Greek (not Roman, as I originally wrote) script that was already known. A bit like having an instruction booklet in three languages, or guessing what a sign saying ‘piso mojado’ means when it also says ‘wet floor’ with a symbol of water lines on a floor. The more examples you have, the more you can say ‘these words/letters/symbols appear in these places consistently, and follow these patterns compared to the language I know’.
2. It depends. Written languages can either be phonetic (symbols match up to sounds) or more symbolic, where characters have their own meanings, and may have started as pictographic representations of things. In the phonetic case, you’d need written and audible sources to figure out what symbols match what sounds, but you might never be able to figure out word meanings without direct translations or guessing by associations that repeat in an archaeological context.
A symbolic language, if you have examples of related and known languages, or the original pictographs they evolved from, you may eventually be able to garner meaning, but never know what the language sounds like.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is completely dependent on knowing a related language, and even Earth languages can be forgotten and be untranslatable until we have a known language/dialect we can directly compare with.
If you want to dive into an example of ancient languages, you might find this interesting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B)
People have an idea on how to speak ancient Egyptian (that’s the language of the Hieroglyphs) when they discovered that the successor language to that ancient language was Coptic. Coptic was pretty much wiped out by the Arabs and the French so all remaining Coptic language comes from the religious texts and rites of the Coptic Christians.
As for aliens we would have a hell of a time communicating. What if the aliens had no spoken language but used gestures or smells or light? Then you have the differences in how we think and see the world. Trying to bridge that gap would be hard, very hard. Most likely the simplest communication would be through simple maths – 1+1=2 and the likes. Maths is pretty foundational and should be fairly universal.
Let’s say that aliens see, hear and experience reality much like we do. So you are face to face with an alien, you both speak different languages and your thought processes are very different. You then whip out a stone and write “1”. You then whip out a second stone, place it next to the first stone and now you write “2”. And once you can both agree that 1+1=2 then you have a basis of further communication. It’ll take a while as you both build up a lexicon of useful words and concepts but it could be done.
Now if for instance an alien communicates by smell or by pheromones then we’re a bit out of luck. We are not evolved to have such a great sense of smell. I wouldn’t even know how we would communicate at that point.
The point is aliens are aliens and there is no guarantee that we would be able to meaningfully communicate as we would human to human. Our biology shaped our consciousness as an aliens’ biology would shape theirs. You may want to read more sci-fi to see what other people have come up with for alien communication.
I don’t know German, but I do know English. I looked up a random Wikipedia article in German and got the following
>(55082) Xlendi
> Asteroid des inneren Hauptgürtels
> (55082) Xlendi ist ein Asteroid des inneren Hauptgürtels, der am 25. August 2001 von dem tschechischen Astronomenehepaar Jana Tichá und Miloš Tichý am Kleť-Observatorium (IAU-Code 046) bei Český Krumlov entdeckt wurde. Eine Sichtung des Asteroiden hatte es vorher schon im Dezember 1998 unter der vorläufigen Bezeichnung 1998 XO69 an der Lincoln Laboratory Experimental Test Site (ETS) in Socorro, New Mexico gegeben.[1]
First I noticed some words I recognize that are the same in English, such as “Asteroid,” “August,” and the place names I recognize in the US. From this I can gather that the two languages share a vocabulary in some cases and are both influenced by Latin at least for some words. Just from words that are similar in English I can sort of parse the meaning
> (55082) Xlendi is an asteroid (that was discovered?) on August 25, 2001 by the team of astronomers Jana Tichá and Milos Tichy at Klet Observatory (IAU-Code 046) in the Czech Republic (no guess for what entdeckt wurde means). A “Sichtung” of asteroids have been ( discovered since) December 1998 under the
“vorläufigen Bezeichnung 1998 XO69 ” and the Lincoln Laboratory Experimental Test Site (ETS) in Socorro, New Mexico.
Now I’m going to check Google translate to see how I did.
> (55082) Xlendi is an inner main-belt asteroid discovered on August 25, 2001 by Czech astronomer couple Jana Tichá and Miloš Tichý at the Kleť Observatory (IAU code 046) near Český Krumlov. The asteroid was previously sighted in December 1998 under the provisional designation 1998 XO69 at the Lincoln Laboratory Experimental Test Site (ETS) in Socorro, New Mexico.[1]
So I didn’t get it right, but I got some. Now if I spent all day reading German works and cross referencing English versions of articles, I could learn German without having to talk to anyone who speaks it. There’s just no reason to do this with a living language because there are so many better ways to learn. However, got a language nobody speaks anymore this sort of thing can be amazing. What usually happens is that someone knows a language they believe will be similar to the target language, and then that person reads and compares to the target
.
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