I might be wrong on this one but for something like the ancient egyptions and the hyieroglyphs, how did they even begin translating those? Same with other languages in general if there’s not “alphabet” for them. How do they know how the words sound phonetically?
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So for a long time ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were completely unreadable. No one knew how to read them. It was forgotten.
Until the Rosetta Stone was found, which was a stone with an official decree carved into it. And that decree was carved on it in three different languages. hieroglyphic, demotic (another ancient Egyptian script) and a form of Greek.
Since we knew Greek and some of the demotic, and since it was the same inscription in all three languages, researchers were able to use that to figure out the pattern and structure of hieroglyphics and crack the code.
For other languages, linguists would try and apply different rules of similar languages in an area, and if that didn’t work then just start trying other rules, until they cracked some kind of pattern.
But that’s no easy feat, and there are some ancient writings that are untranslatable to this day.
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