3 ms·

...and you get a stretch of valid language... How do you know it's valid?

• krapp 3y ago
  ... you can read and comprehend it?
• tdeck 3y ago
  This is actually a good question. Before the Rosetta stone work there were a number of published "translations" of Egyptian hieroglyph texts that were honest attempts at decoding the written language (as opposed to frauds). Typically they were somewhat nonsensical and this fact was papered over with "it's a religious text". In my opinion we see the same thing with proposed translations of yet undeciphered scripts like Rongorongo. One thing these typically share is they rely heavily on proposed ideograms and have little or no phonetic component, because there's more room to massage meaning with ideograms.
• thaumasiotes 3y ago
  >> However, ancient languages are usually not understood that well, which makes it impossible to determine whether a decoding really is or isn't valid.