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Most interesting - AI - See and hear ancient people speaking their contemporary language
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Of course, to know what the pronunciation of ancient peoples was, many audio cassettes recorded thousands of years ago have been found
Actually, the way linguists work is they try to read the language and connect it to modern local dialects to get more insights. For example the Rosetta Stone had written on it in three scripts the name of the king Prolemy with a circle around it (in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, In Ancient Egyptian Demotic and in Ancient Greek) and from this word in Ancient Greek they started getting insights in hieroglyphics and unveiling the meanings of them in ancient Egyptian. An other example is the deciphering of Linear B glyphs which was Ancient Greek. They assumed that a symbol like a sword was writting "ξίφος"="ksifos"="sword" in Ancient Greek, and from this substituting it in other occurances and combining it with modern spoken words of locals they have managed to read and unveil the whole meaning of the script.
Fun fact: A script can contain syllabograms or signle letters that expose a specific sound. The first thing a linguist will do is count the different "images" and if they are less than 28-30 then they are letters but if they are 64-90 they are syllabograms (that is two letters combined, consonant+vowel, to produce a syllable - modern Korean is like this and also Japanese). At last if they are much more than 90 then they are ideograms like Chinese. Summing this all up even if you do not know what the script writes just by counting the different "occurances" you can get an initial insight of how the written script approaches the language. This was the initial step in reading the Mayas script.
Of course there will be some errors in approaching the pronunciation but in this case you can see a video in Ancient YouTube...
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All this indicates how linguists try to interpret ancient languages but nothing to do with pronunciations, sounds, which they will never be able to recreate even vaguely, only by dreaming!Actually, the way linguists work is they try to read the language and connect it to modern local dialects to get more insights. For example the Rosetta Stone had written on it in three scripts the name of the king Prolemy with a circle around it (in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, In Ancient Egyptian Demotic and in Ancient Greek) and from this word in Ancient Greek they started getting insights in hieroglyphics and unveiling the meanings of them in ancient Egyptian. An other example is the deciphering of Linear B glyphs which was Ancient Greek. They assumed that a symbol like a sword was writting "ξίφος"="ksifos"="sword" in Ancient Greek, and from this substituting it in other occurances and combining it with modern spoken words of locals they have managed to read and unveil the whole meaning of the script.
Fun fact: A script can contain syllabograms or signle letters that expose a specific sound. The first thing a linguist will do is count the different "images" and if they are less than 28-30 then they are letters but if they are 64-90 they are syllabograms (that is two letters combined to produce a syllable - modern Korean is like this and also Japanese). At last if they are much more than 90 then they are ideograms like Chinese. Summing this all up even if you do not know what the script writes just by counting the different "occurances" you can get an initial insight of how the written script approaches the language. This was the initial step in reading the Mayas script.
Of course there will be some errors in approaching the pronunciation but in this case you can see a video in Ancient YouTube...
I am sorry Luca. I didn't mean to make you feel bad and even more to piss you off.
Science always accepts and uses what is known to us (proved using the scientific method) up to the point of now (to the current knowledge and logic).
The scientific method is performed by three steps:
1) Observe the facts
2) Make a theory that explains what is happening
3) Make experiments to see if their outcomes justify your theory or reject it
There is no other approach. I am not a linguist but if you hear from me the phrase "I am now table at the tyre to neglect in bathroom" you will make out that a stroke might have occured in my head and I am talking nonsense, or that I am just a monkey hitting buttons connected with words in a chat box behind a door. If I tell you though that "Goddess Athena has punished Medussa, which was a priest in her sanctuary, because she was raped, and transformed her in a monster with snakes for hair and cursed her that whoever was looking at directly in their eyes, they would be turned into stone." would you make the same assumption?
What I am trying to say is that even if the linguists make assumptions if the result makes sense since they did it by putting the pieces together on a jigsaw puzzle following the scientific method there is a more than a high chance that this is accurate. And that is up to current knowledge and logic.
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...and they cannot "observe" phonemes from thousands of years ago.
You are right. I also assumed and maybe it is wrong that linguists connect the observations with assumptions (but what I call assumption, maybe, it is step 2 - a theory that explains what is happening). You are a programmer. Make in B4J a program that counts the occurrences of different letters in Italian text and feed it with lots of text from web pages (use only one case letters). If you have gathered the insight of the different "images" notion and you know they are letters then you can compare what is known to you today (the percentages of appearances of letters) with the percentages of appearances of the "images" and this can guide you by comparing similar percentages and assuming that "this" is "this". This is an observation+assumption and an approach I concluded and is most probably not that correct because languages do evolve (for example if you compare modern Greek with Ancient Greek although the notion is comprehensible the syntax has changed a lot - and I can't be sure since they used different syntax that the percentages of letters will be the same). An observation combined with assumption, also, was the circle around the name of the king Ptolemy in the Rosetta Stone and at last, exactly the same was the observation+assumption that the "sword" glyph in Linear-B spelled "ξίφος".