Decipherment

In philology and linguistics, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct languages and/or alphabets.^[1] Decipherment is possible with respect to languages and scripts. One can also study or try to decipher how spoken languages that no longer exist were once pronounced, or how living languages used to be pronounced in prior eras.

Notable examples of decipherment include the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts and the decipherment of cuneiform. Today, at least a dozen languages remain undeciphered.^[2] A prominent case of a recent decipherment was that of the Linear Elamite script.^[3] Historically speaking, decipherments do not come suddenly through single individuals who "crack" ancient scripts. Instead, they emerge from the incremental progress brought about by a broader community of researchers.^[4]

Decipherment should not be confused with cryptanalysis, which aims to decipher special written codes or ciphers used in intentionally concealed secret communication (especially during war). It should also not be confused with determining the meaning of ambiguous text in a known language (interpretation).^[4]

^ Trask, R.L (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ("The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of the script—that is, determining the values of the written characters")
^ Luo, Jiaming; Hartmann, Frederik; Santus, Enrico; Barzilay, Regina; Cao, Yuan (2021). "Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior". Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 9: 69–81. arXiv:2010.11054. doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00354. ISSN 2307-387X.
^ Cite error: The named reference :4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ ^a ^b Frawley, William, ed. (2003). International encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford University Press. p. 420. ISBN 978-0-19-513977-8.

[1] Trask, R.L (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ("The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of the script—that is, determining the values of the written characters")

[:0-2] Luo, Jiaming; Hartmann, Frederik; Santus, Enrico; Barzilay, Regina; Cao, Yuan (2021). "Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior". Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 9: 69–81. arXiv:2010.11054. doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00354. ISSN 2307-387X.

[:4-3] Cite error: The named reference :4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[:5-4] Frawley, William, ed. (2003). International encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford University Press. p. 420. ISBN 978-0-19-513977-8.

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