I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on the Epic of Gilgamesh. One of the sources cited states that “According to a long-standing Assyriological convention, the legendary ruler of Uruk had two names: Bilgames in Sumerian and Gilgames in Akkadian.”
How can we know that?
Sumerian is a language isolate, and it hasn’t been spoken for thousands of years. It wasn’t until the 19th century that people began deciphering Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions on excavated tablets. How can we know the phonology of such languages?
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It took time to decipher, and in many areas we’re still working on it. But that’s an aside — to your question, scribes in Assyria wrote out translation tablets that we can read today. Like this: [Cuneiform Tablet a Tri lingual dictionary | National Museum Of Damascus (virtual-museum-syria.org)](https://virtual-museum-syria.org/damascus/cuneiform-tablet-a-tri-lingual-dictionary/)
Scribes wrote out language-learning dictionaries. Somewhat how we have Spanish-English dictionaries today, they did similar things back then. Many languages (though not all) used cuneiform script and anyone going into a profession of scribe, politics, etc. would have to be familiar with multiple languages same as we do now. And once we can read one language on such a tablet (if/when we find one) we can use the ancient language-teaching text ourselves, absent the live teacher.
Unfortunately they didn’t write for every possible language or script, but Sumerian was on their list of important languages and so we have quite a bit of material to help us decipher the language even though it is both extinct and an isolate.
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