Can it be done without a "Rosetta Stone"?

[Davidsch]

Yes, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of Aramaic. These days any dialect should be quite easy to recognize.


The script is the bottle-neck indeed: if you understand how to transcribe the text, you are almost there.
Because we now can compare text with a computer it is simply a matter of comparison.

What you can do is to compare all possible transcriptions that you can think of with any known written transcribed language. That is what I am doing.

...

I would venture to suggest that a completely unknown language which has no direct correlation for us - no proper names, no obvious link to a known reference - would be impossible to translate.

We might be able to draw up its syntax and grammar, and even correlate that framework to our own (ngram x is a proposition, ngram y when a suffix is a verbal modifier, etc) but actually saying that word a equates to "Paris" and word b equates to "David" would be completely subjective and impossible to verify.

I disagree with that.  With hard work and serious research a lot is possible.
Based on solely the text,  you can make a SVO or VSO model, which then can lead to a proper translation and the rough idea of the text can be "guessed" based on the correct approach. That is the same "typing/ language predictions" work.