Assuming this person would be part of the upper class and would have the time to study properly. How would studying even work when there’s no language to translate to and from?
assuming there isnt GOAULD involved too.
This is one place where I think modern schools categorically fail, is teaching languages. They teach languages in ways that are easy to create multiple choice tests for because those are easy to grade. In reality, you don’t teach an Anglophone French by speaking English to him, you teach French in French. It can be practical to have a common language to fall back on but you learn a language by speaking it.
Now, “Ancient Egypt” refers to a knee bucklingly long span of time; There were pharaohs who employed archaeologists to study the Giza pyramids, because by the time anyone named Ramses was around, the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre were already thousands of years old. If you were to end up as a Connecticut Yankee in King Djoser’s Court, some 5500 years ago, none of the languages English evolved from have emerged yet. You’re going to be operating at the level of holding up a basket with a quizzical look on your face until your host says “nb.” Then you’ll try to say it back, and so forth. Your vocabulary will build and eventually you’ll be talking just like one of them.
Land in Ptolemaic times and you can do the same exact thing but in Greek or Latin.
Currently learning a third language as an adult, with my first two being from childhood. This rings true. I took 2 years of it in middle school and got nowhere, but now that I’m actually putting effort into it I’m picking it up super quick.
I’m using Duolingo for regimented practice, but supplementing it with music I enjoy, podcasts, and even Pokemon Go. Middle school mostly just gave me rote memorization of vocab that I barely remember, but nearly no immersion
I took two years of French in high school, I can say ai as a avons avez ont. Because that’s most of the french I actually spoke aloud in that class. Two years I “studied” this language, I’m not sure I’d be able to safely spend a week in France, I’d be hit by a train because I didn’t understand the warning sign.
That’s not how they taught me English. In second language classes, they’ll try to teach you rules like adjective order; like how we always say a wonderful big red balloon. If you said a red wonderful big balloon you sound broken. ESL students will be taught that their first semester, a native English speaker will follow that rule perfectly without consciously knowing it exists for 30 years until it is pointed out by that linguist tiktok guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion might be an interesting read 🚀
So first, learn Greek.
Second, go to the town called “Rosetta”.
Second learn ancient Greek, although that will only help in the very much later part of the Egypt’s kingdom years
Wait, what do you mean with no point of reference? If you were physically there the whole world would be your point of reference. You could point at a rock and make a grunting sound and somebody would eventually tell you the word for “rock”. They’d have actual teachers. How you would go about accessing them is anybody’s guess, but hey, they’d exist.
The hard part would be learning it when there’s nobody left to speak it because making grunting sounds in the general direction of rocks is famously ineffective at decoding ancient documents.
If you live in somewhere where said language is spoken by everyone around you, you’ll start to understand the language over time no matter what language it is.
Easiest example: children!
This exact thing has happened many many times in history. Not someone transported through time, but someone travelling to a place where nobody (or virtually nobody) speaks the same language, or even one related to yours.
I mean, for the extremely obvious examples, before the Columbian exchange, nobody in the Old World (Eurasia/Africa) had ever encountered any New World (Americas) language and vice versa. They managed to learn how to communicate within a fairly short time period.
But this was just the most obvious example. Until relatively recently (like past half millennia, or so), it was common enough.
You’d learn through immersion. You hear the language every day all day. You try to communicate by pointing and gesturing. Pretty soon you start picking up individual words (point at a piece of bread and say ‘bread’ over and over. Someone is going to respond with their word for bread. Do that a few times and you’ll learn the word for bread, etc, etc). That builds into common phrases. Before too long, you’re able to hold very rudimentary conversations, and it just builds from there.
You will always have points of reference. Common things that you see and do throughout your everyday life. And you will hear people speak of those things in the native language. Eventually, you’ll start to catch on and learn the language.
How difficult would it be? That really depends on the individual and their ability to pick up languages.
Language is natural to humans. It would be hard, but you’ll eventually get there if there’s no alternative. Think that babies learn how to speak without having any previous language of reference. It’s just a thing our brain does spontaneously. Watch or read Shogun, you’ll notice how multilingualism is actually more common than we think. And historically people have always spoken several languages. Depending on which point in time you’d get to ancient Egypt (we are talking about a really long period of time, over 3 thousand years), the high class would probably also speak Greek, Latin, or Arabic. Depending on diplomatic relations and pressures. Not to mention the lay people would also probably speak other languages alongside Egyptian, like Domari and Hebrew.
Another interesting thought, if you traveled to late ancient Egypt, learned to speak there, let’s say five years or so. Then traveled further back in time to early ancient Egypt, you probably won’t understand a single word again. If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.
If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.
Yup. You could probably go back to the late 1300s and get a grasp within weeks instead of months, at least in the southern half of England, and it would get easier with each passing decade, but you’d probably have to drop in a couple of generations after Shakespeare to be sure of being mostly functional on Day One.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
…
…
…yeah
points at date
Egyptian mf: " 𓂧𓄿𓏏𓅂"
Repeat
Ancient Duolingo, duh…
Depends on the person. I can tell you it is very likely I would not be doing very well after years but I know some folks who would be able to do as well in weeks or months.
One technique I’ve heard being used by Bible translators to learn new languages: show some curious/interesting object, you’ll learn the phrase “what is this?”, then start pointing at everything and repeating it.
The key to all this is UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING!
