We can read and translate many ancient languages throughout history, like ancient greek, ancient egyptian, medieval english, etc, with pretty much 100% accuracy as far as i can tell.
But how well do we know on how those ancient languages were spoken? How far back can you go and be certain on how certain languages were spoken, pronounced, with what accent, etc? When i hear ancient languages spoken in documentaries or whatever, are those just guesses on how they were spoken?
If i say time travelled back to ancient egypt or medieval europe, and knew of the language there, would i be able to communicate through writting only? Or do we know through various means how to speak them as well?
So -- this comes from a friend who studied Latin at CUNY (if you're interested, they have a really great summer program teaching Latin and Ancient Greek).
Now, I can only speak to Latin, but it's probably generally the same for other languages:
Poetry helps. Once you know the meter, you can get a feeling for how each vowel sounded.
Latin was used for a very long time, and in that time the spelling of words changed to reflect it's correct pronunciation. Take for example the word you. Imagine you're entirely unfamiliar with English -- that word looks like it should be pronounced yo-uu, right? But, I'm betting when you're feeling lazy, you've written you as u. You'll notice, legible graffiti, even now, has really lazy spelling. Same thing happened in Ancient Rome. So, you're a linguist and you're looking at graffiti on a wall at the excavation sight of old New York and you see graffiti saying I luv u sarah that tells you right away how the words love and you would have been pronounced by an English speaker in the year 2000 AD.
There was also some forward thinking Roman writers who created language guides that can help us.
And finally, the Romance languages. They've all diverged from Latin to some degree, but when you find prevailing rules within each language, you can figure out which of these pronunciation rules were the same for original Latin
As for whether you could learn this, go back to Rome and have a chat with Caesar, have you ever talked to a non-native English speaker that had a strange, flat accent that you couldn't place? They're so proficient in English that you don't spot that tell-tale German, French, etc. English accent, but it just sounds a bit off? That would probably be you.
Hi, not discouraging other contributions, but fyi there have been some interesting threads on this subject.
From the FAQ:
Here's a fun one that looks at a single word in excruciating detail:
This one has links for Ancient Egyptian, and to a collection of posts on various ancient languages:
Follow-up question. WHEN did we re-discover the original pronunciation of (for example) classical Latin or Shakespearean English?