Can it be done without a "Rosetta Stone"?

[Sam G]

For the linguists -

About 'rosetta stones' - am I mistaken in thinking that Tocharian was an unknown script in an unknown language when the fragments were found by Aurel Stein?

The language was unknown, but the script was not - it was a form of Brahmi script.  And many of the texts were translations of Buddhist scriptures, so they had bilingual texts to work with.  And Tocharian is an Indo-European language, so it does have some similarities in terms of vocabulary and grammar with other IE languages.

Does the way it was approached, and its basics so soon sorted, offer any hope for us?

Probably not.