How do people translate ancient languages which no one speaks?

Question

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

Answer 1

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
.