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
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.
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