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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There’s a lot of guesswork still involved, but for ancient languages like Sumerian (that were written down), we can roughly reconstruct pronunciation. We can even reconstruct languages that were never spoken. It probably will never be exactly how things were pronounced, but it is ballpark.
Firstly, since something like Sumerian was written down in Cuneiform (which can represent syllables), we already get a rough ballpark of its expected pronunciation. Basically, since Cuneiform was a widely used script across the middle east, once it was deciphered (Akkadian specifically), scholars could get a rough idea of how other languages sounded, assuming they used a similar sound-symbol correlation. Of course, this means that the phonology of Sumerian isn’t that well understood since there are of course general differences in how the languages were pronounced, and anything sounds that other languages didn’t need from Cuneiform weren’t necessarily used.
The Etruscan language is similar. The Romans actually took the Etruscan’s alphabet to write down Latin. However, since then the Etruscan language itself has been lost, but we can ‘read’ their inscriptions phonetically even if we don’t necessarily understand what the words meant.
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