I searched up previous questions like this out of curiosity (and as per rule 5), but the most I found were simple things like physical objects or contextual filler words. I’m still quite confused about how both the first spoken and written languages were deciphered. I understand pointing at a rock and saying “rocher” in French and “felsen” in German and then knowing what a rock is in their language, but there are so many filler words or just nonphysical words in general that I couldn’t imagine how people started understanding each other.
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If it’s a living language it’s not hard, get speaker from each language and try to learn it, they’ll figure it out (eventually getting to the point that they can just ask the other person what is the word for that). You can learn a language with zero knowledge of it (think of kids) and just become bilingual.
If it’s a dead language you can figure it out with enough text, but it takes a lot and a real dead language tends to not have much. We can also infer a lot because languages are based on other languages.
People helped each other learn each others language. They were not sitting in a room translating an unknown language. They were interacting with someone and gradually learning.
I agree with what others were saying: the first translations were happening between (say) French and Spanish, or Dutch and German, languages that already shared a common grammar and syntax.
When we encounter a language completely foreign to our own, we really really struggle with it. For centuries, no one in Europe could read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was just too foreign. The “Rosetta Stone” was discovered in the early 1800s, and it copies down a message in three languages: hieroglyphics, demotic or alphabetized Egyptian, and Greek. Even then, it took a few years to crack the code, as it were.
Lots of native speakers don’t fully understand the grammar rules of their own language — it’s possible that a lot of people can “translate” between languages or speak bilingually while not being exactly precise about it; professional translators would go the extra mile and figure these things out.
Imagine a child today with parents that speak two different languages. The child, even before school, after spending time with both parents, learns both languages and can translate between them.
Now replace the child and parents with a person living in a trading village with two main languages used.
You can think of how babies learn language. Babies start with nothing, and they learn thanks to their parents patiently teaching them and showing them things and talking to them until it starts to make sense. And then the babies repeat the sounds their parents make, and if they get it right parents are happy, and if they’re close parents will teach them the right way to say it.
If a baby can start with no language and learn to be fluent in a few years from their parents, then you can certainly imagine how intelligent adults with a reason to want to speak to each other (such as wanting to trade) can teach each other their languages.
Languages didn’t just pop out of thin air. They developed over time, branching out. Most European languages are part of a language family called Indo-European, and they’re believed to all stem from one language, called Proto Indo-European, spoken thousands of years ago. The fact is that for most languages, there was never really a time when people ONLY spoke that that language, there were always people speaking multiple, who could translate.
For isolated languages, like Native Americans, it was basically “kidnap them, take them to Europe, and force them to learn”.
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