[sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg]

> And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.

I feel this conclusion rather weak.

As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed [1]. Another one is the hieroglyphs.

Re-constructing how mayan words sounded is still on-going [2].

Also, this type of work is not really possible to "crack with computers" as some have suggested (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment

2: https://decipherment.wordpress.com/

[Mediterraneo10]

> As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed

That is no counterexample. The Mayan written language was related to a number of surviving languages, making decipherment easier.

> Another one is the hieroglyphs.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs could not be deciphered until the discovery of the Rosetta stone, where the hieroglyphic text was accompanied by translations into Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Before that, there had been attempts for many centuries to decipher the hieroglyphs but they proved fruitless.

[empath75]

The people that decoded the mayan language had the advantage of having several actively spoken maya languages to work from.