: how do researchers find the sound of dead languages with just the written text without ever hearing it.
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Languages don’t appear out of thin air. They evolve over time, and they tend to evolve in predictable ways. Compare, say, English, German, Italian, French and Spanish, you’ll see a lot of similarities.
For example, words that end in “ty” in English tend to end in “té” in French, “tät” in German, “dad” in Spanish and “tà” in Italian. Nationality. Nationalité. Nationalität. Nacionalidad. Nazionalità.
So they can work out how dead languages likely sounded by studying how modern languages formed, and working backwards. They don’t even need the writing. Proto Indo-European is the name given to the ancestor of the Indo-European language families (Basically most of the languages spoken today in Europe and India). It has no written record, but we’ve worked out what it was like based on how the modern-day languages are, and comparing them.
Of course, it’s not perfect. A bit like looking at a group of children and trying to identify their parents by comparing their facial features, but it’s still pretty accurate, as far as we know.
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