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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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.
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