Editing Decipherment (section)

{{short description|Rediscovery of a language or script's meaning}}
{{Redirect|Decipher}}
{{For|the concept in cryptography|Decryption}}

In [[philology]] and [[linguistics]], '''decipherment''' is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct [[language]]s and/or [[alphabet]]s.<ref>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")</ref> 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]]. A notable decipherment in recent years is that of the [[Linear Elamite]] script.<ref name=":4" /> Today, at least a dozen languages remain undeciphered.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last1=Luo |first1=Jiaming |last2=Hartmann |first2=Frederik |last3=Santus |first3=Enrico |last4=Barzilay |first4=Regina |last5=Cao |first5=Yuan |date=2021 |title=Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior |url=https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/97780 |journal=Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics |language=en |volume=9 |pages=69–81 |doi=10.1162/tacl_a_00354 |issn=2307-387X|arxiv=2010.11054 }}</ref> 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.<ref name=":5" />

Decipherment should not be confused with [[cryptanalysis]], which aims to decipher special written codes or [[cipher]]s 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).<ref name=":5">{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sl_dDVctycgC&pg=PA417 |title=International encyclopedia of linguistics |date=2003 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-513977-8 |editor-last=Frawley |editor-first=William |edition= |location= |pages=420}}</ref>