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

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.