How do we know how extinct languages sounded?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

To an extent, there is always going to be some guesswork. We can’t “know” in the way we know about things we can observe in the present. But we can get clues.

For example, even after Akkadian displaced it as the primary spoken language, Sumerian still functioned as a sacred and academic language, much like Latin today. By going through tablets of Akkadian, we can find references to Sumerian words that sound like Akkadian ones. And since there are a plethora of living Semitic languages, we have a connection we can work with.

If you read enough ancient literature, you’ll find lots of clues. Cognates, rhymes, puns, etc. It’s a lot like the Rosetta Stone but with phonology instead of vocabulary and grammar. If something we can read and sound out refers to something we don’t know, we can start putting the pieces together.

There are, of course, constructed pronunciation systems as well. Most Westerners I know sound Greek according the the Erasmian system, which was invented by Western scholars to study Greek, and doesn’t sound at all like how Greek is spoken today or was spoken in antiquity.

EDIT: I should add that linguists also have a few tricks. By studying how living languages shift in pronunciation, they can find patterns. Some human vocal sounds will shift in common ways. We can cautiously infer they may have shifted a similar way back then too.

Im not a linguist or philologist btw. I’ve had to brush up on ancient languages that are related to my own field. I’m sure there’s more than what I’ve listed.