I've been reading a number of books recently dealing with how
various languages were discovered, analyzed, and translated in
the past. If the language itself is unknown, the key has almost
always been what's referred to as a 'bilingual', some text of
sufficient length written in at least one known language as well
as the unknown. The most famous example of this is of course the
1,700-lb Rosetta stone, with the same text in Greek, demotic,
and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Rosetta stone allowed Champollion
(arguably) to finish deciphering the hieroglyphic language by
means of comparing proper names in the Greek and attempting to
find the equivalent hieroglyphs. I started thinking about how
various languages might be deciphered in a distant future when
humans were long gone. It occurred to me that about the only
real stone inscriptions in any quantity are those that appear on
grave stones, and the length of each inscription consists almost
entirely of names and numbers if not exclusively. Granted, there
are also so