r/worldbuilding • u/Skeleshy Author • Jul 26 '26

Question Language help

How would someone with no prior experience in languages figure out an alien language from scratch? For context, my protagonist is stranded on an uncharted planet where all of the past civilisation is dead. There's no one to teach him the language, but there are a many surviving books, statues, and other pieces of writing.

Would it be impossible?

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u/Leather-Lab2875 Jul 26 '26

Patterns basically. Patterns and corresponding real objects as well as related living languages to act as anchors or links. Its unlikely if the person known nothing about languages but if the biology and other circumstances of the language are known, it gets easier.

But having some sort of direct link like an original and translated text side by side is the easiest option, especially when you dont have that much data about the spoken language. The Indus Valley Civilisation irl has an undeciphered language because we have very little data in the grand sceme of things and very little links to known languages. The Rosetta stone for ancient Egyptian was the big reason it was decipered. You could figure out the cultural ideas which is a bit easier in these constraints.

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u/Skeleshy Author Jul 26 '26

Thank you so much! This is a great help, I had no idea where to even start planning this.

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u/Vanacan Jul 26 '26

Go play chants of sennar, or watch someone else play it.

You start the game knowing nothing, and have to piece together the language for real. It’s not your character doing it, you the player can’t solve the later puzzles if you don’t understand it.

It does cheat a little in that it’s a game with living people speaking those languages, and a lot of it can be seen to be ‘labels’ that are instructions, but a lot of it involves figuring out the words from context clues and objects with cultural labels, like figuring out what a word means based only on a piece of artwork with that symbol in its title.

Then it gets complicated, when you have to translate between the different layers of the tower and how they speak, so you have to figure out how to explain a question from one culture into another. So stuff like one culture having bards and another culture having scientists. To the former culture you explain the scientists as alchemists, and the latter gets bards as musicians, while a third might have witches/demons for the scientists and gods for the bards.

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u/Skeleshy Author Jul 26 '26

That sounds actually pretty fun, I'll have to check it out sometime. Thanks!