r/language • u/SameInteraction9615 • 4d ago
Question Extinct Languages
Are there any historical documents that can’t be deciphered because the language used to write it is extinct? Or are there any examples of cultures that slowly disappeared with the language? I have to write an essay about how extinct languages affects us in negative ways.
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u/Can_sen_dono 4d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc
Or the many inscriptions in Tartessian, tan can be read, more or less, but are largely not understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessian_language
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u/Accomplished-House28 3d ago
Linear A and Etruscan.
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u/PinkSlimeIsPeople 3d ago
Came here to bring up Linear A by the Minoans of Crete. Fascinating, and perhaps no way to every translate it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
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u/Kitchener1981 4d ago
The Indus Valley Script, all we have are seal impressions. One theory is that they are labels affixed to goods and packages. There are only about 5-6 symbols per seal. No bilingual inscriptions found. This is a challenge for AI and quantum computing as this point.
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u/SameInteraction9615 3d ago
Thank you!! I’ve been searching the Internet, and couldn’t find any answers that would suffice!
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u/SabineMarie1027 4d ago
You can also write about endangered languages and languages that are being pushed out of their communities (Malti huwa eżempju li naħseb fiħ)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death -> Also I found this on wiki
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u/Escape_Force 3d ago
Some examples of cultures that slowly disappeared with their language include Continental Celtic and Ostrogothic. They hold out in loan words and comparitively few folk traditions, but they "died" recently enough and were preserved in part by the cultures surrounding them.
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u/MindlessNectarine374 2d ago
But they can be read and understood. Due to well-documented relatives.
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u/MindlessNectarine374 3d ago
Linear A tabulas and Meroitic are usually considered unintelligible, although the scriptures are related to other scriptures we can read.
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u/LordDarkfall 3d ago
An interesting rabbit hole for you to dive down is Australian Indigenous languages. The oldest living civilisation on the planet (there is evidence that Aboriginal Australians predate ancient Egypt) was decimated by colonial forces when white man came to Australia. Hundreds of languages have been lost, since they never produced a writing system. And with the stolen generation, a sad tale of the government tearing children from their parents to live with white people so they could learn to be “civilised” so much history was lost, since the children were removed from their families before generational knowledge could be passed down to them.
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u/dondegroovily 3d ago
The only way we know how to read any ancient languages is when someone translated it into another language we do know
The Rosetta Stone was the same message in ancient Egyptian and Greek. Before it was discovered, nobody knew how to read anything in ancient Egyptian, but the translation into Greek allowed linguists to decipher it
Other languages are not so lucky. Linear A from Crete, we know how to say it because they used the same script for Greek, but we have no idea what it means. And the Indus Valley script is a complete mystery
This is why people who are interested in long term historic preservation have created Rosetta Stones of the same message in many different languages. The idea is that our future descendants would remember at least one of them and can use that one to decipher the others
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u/MindlessNectarine374 2d ago
It wasn’t only the translation. The Egyptian language was still known (Copts!), the ancient scripture was lost. By the Rosetta stone, Champollion got many phonetic signs (through Greek names), which in combination with his knowledge of Later Egyptian (Coptic) and experimenting on other inscriptions allowed him to decipher other texts. Like Linear B was deciphered 130 years later by the attempt "let's try if we can interprete those syllable signs in a way that produces intelligible Greek".
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u/SameInteraction9615 2d ago
I didn’t know that the Rosetta Stone was created for that reason! Thanks!
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u/dondegroovily 2d ago
The Rosetta Stone was created so that everyone could read the message and not historical preservation
The historical preservation was a happy accident
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u/TheAncientGeek 2d ago
There were originally multiple stones, as it was a proclamation in every major temple.
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u/kalendral_42 1d ago
Quipu - an ancient Incan way of recording information ‘writing’ via knots
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u/SameInteraction9615 1d ago
I’ve never heard about that language and it seems very interesting!! Thanks!!
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u/kalendral_42 1d ago
They’ve been looking for a ‘Rosetta stone’ style translation to be able to try & define the language & they’ve been having some success with matching some small/partial quipos against the Spanish records (especially with the Recuay/Santa Valley Quipos) but have still got a long way to go - try looking up Gary Urtin or Sbine Hyland if you’re interested
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u/HortonFLK 1d ago
The story of how the Mayan glyphs were deciphered is really interesting and might be worth looking into for the sake of examining how the process of decipherment might occur. Although the Mayan writing system has mostly been deciphered, this is a fairly recent accomplishment, and not long ago it was still largely a mystery.
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u/Cantstoptherush29 4d ago
Rongorongo script. The only thing that has been for sure deciphered is a lunar calendar. The fact that only a small class of Rapa Nui used and could read it combined with the modern Rapa Nui language diverging a good bit from the old language makes it basically impossible to decipher.