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

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)