Pictographs are difficult, and I'm not sure how pronunciation is sussed out since even modern, living languages have diverging pronunciations in pictographic wr

Pictographs are difficult, and I'm not sure how pronunciation is sussed out since even modern, living languages have diverging pronunciations in pictographic written languages. For morpheme based languages (i.e., where the letters make sounds, and then the collective sounds hold meaning), pronunciation can be backtrace by looking at the shifts of child languages. For instance, a lot of english T words had shifted from D words (e.g., 'dens' from french/latin for tooth, to english 'tooth'; many words experienced a d->t shift). When you compare this to other child languages who experienced other shifts, you can sort of triangulate back to the original pronunciation based on how the child languages ended up. It's sort of like genetics, in a way: if you have two children, one with blonde hair and the other with brown hair, you can infer that one parent had to be blonde. E: One more analogy since it came to me: Imagine you see a few people walking in different directions, and you want to know where they all started from. You can look at where they are, try to group them in to similar types ('cognates', which words do we think came from the same word), and then look at the path they seem to have been walking down. Then, you draw a line back from where they are, through the path they came from, and hope that the lines you draw for all of them intersect at some point, and that point is your source. E2: Explaining pronunciation through text is hard.