Oh. Well that renders most of my response irrelevant. Then the answer is “probably yes”. Getting the basics of the grammar won’t take much effort. So one can tentatively identify which words are verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. Assuming that you aren’t going out of your way to be terse with your speech, there will be a fair bit of redundancy that should in a large enough text become obvious. For example, if we’ve identified how one says “and” in the language or at least the version for nouns, then might be able to identify the plural form for verbs, or something close to that. Moreover, if we see a word that frequently shows up near the word for “and” we could tentatively guess that that was a word for two as a cardinal number. Similarly, one might be able to get three as a cardinal number. This gets a handle on your number system.
In the direct context of Navajo which you used as your other example, one also has a correspondence with physical events which if one had that data could potentially help a lot.
So if a time-traveling mischief maker gave the NSA a copy of “The Klingon Hamlet” in 1980 (minus all the English text), would they have been able to “decrypt” it?
So if a time-traveling mischief maker gave the NSA a copy of “The Klingon Hamlet” in 1980, would they have been able to “decrypt” it?
That’s a difficult case. It would depend on the resources thrown into it. If it were formatted as a play it wouldn’t take long for someone to notice that, and the five acts would to an English speaker suggest Shakespeare. (This isn’t a hypothesis someone would immediately hit upon but it is the sort of thing that someone would eventually think of.) At that point things will be much easier since we have an effective Rosetta stone. However, note that even with the Rosetta stone, the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs took a very long time even after the main breakthroughs.
If the text were not the text of Hamlet but were a similar random text of the same length, then it is almost certainly not long enough to be decipherable in any reasonable span of time. I don’t however have any idea how much longer the text would need to be.
Oh. Well that renders most of my response irrelevant. Then the answer is “probably yes”. Getting the basics of the grammar won’t take much effort. So one can tentatively identify which words are verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. Assuming that you aren’t going out of your way to be terse with your speech, there will be a fair bit of redundancy that should in a large enough text become obvious. For example, if we’ve identified how one says “and” in the language or at least the version for nouns, then might be able to identify the plural form for verbs, or something close to that. Moreover, if we see a word that frequently shows up near the word for “and” we could tentatively guess that that was a word for two as a cardinal number. Similarly, one might be able to get three as a cardinal number. This gets a handle on your number system.
In the direct context of Navajo which you used as your other example, one also has a correspondence with physical events which if one had that data could potentially help a lot.
So if a time-traveling mischief maker gave the NSA a copy of “The Klingon Hamlet” in 1980 (minus all the English text), would they have been able to “decrypt” it?
That’s a difficult case. It would depend on the resources thrown into it. If it were formatted as a play it wouldn’t take long for someone to notice that, and the five acts would to an English speaker suggest Shakespeare. (This isn’t a hypothesis someone would immediately hit upon but it is the sort of thing that someone would eventually think of.) At that point things will be much easier since we have an effective Rosetta stone. However, note that even with the Rosetta stone, the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs took a very long time even after the main breakthroughs.
If the text were not the text of Hamlet but were a similar random text of the same length, then it is almost certainly not long enough to be decipherable in any reasonable span of time. I don’t however have any idea how much longer the text would need to be.