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 depends. For some extinct languages, e.g. Classical Latin, we actually have surviving sources that describe the way the language was spoken. For languages like Proto-Indo-European, there are no surviving texts. What we can observe though is the tendency for fairly regular patterns of sound change to occur in spoken language, and how those patterns of sound change differ between languages. Sound changes rarely affect single words in isolation – they are systemic (for example, a good number of Latin words with an ‘f’ sound have lost that sound on Spanish).
The reconstruction of PIE has largely been a process of looking for cognates among existing languages and working backwards to the roots by observing historical patterns of phonetic change in those languages.
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