No problem with adding me as a friend at all. I'm going to friend you back if you don't mind.

Friend ya right back!

I've been planning to add a page on the site about the process of decipherment that would answer you just asked. But in the absence of that, the reason why we know that a symbol has a certain sound because of actually quite complicated reasons.

In more fortuitous cases, the key lies in bilingual inscriptions with an unknown language and a known one. Proper names like place names or personal names are usually the same or very similar across languages. Identifying the same name on the two inscriptions (from approximate locations as well as repetitions in the text) will help assign sound values to signs of the name in the unknown language. As you can imagine this is a very slow process, and often times some of the first signs could be wrongly interpreted as more decipherments come in.

For example, Champollion deciphered Egyptian by working with cartouches that always encircle Egyptian royal names. Since the names of Ptolemaic kings are known, he was able to "read" hieroglyphic signs by comparing them to Greek.

A more difficult case is that of Linear B, which didn't have any bilingual texts. Instead, its primary decipherer, Michael Ventris, guessed that certain repeated patterns are place names like Knossos or Phaistos, and after much tedious work he was proven to be right.

I hope this explains your question.

Hi there! Perfectly OK to friend me. I just friended you too.

And thanks for the compliment about the site. Hopefully I'll be able to work on it again.

Oh sure!

Thanks!

I've been wanting to do Hungarian rovas, but the problem is that none of my source material actually have a chart of the alphabet. I need to go to a library to get better material but I just haven't gotten the time to do that yet.