Is it possible to make sense of an unknown language by means of cryptanalysis?
If you've got many examples of a language then you can probably perform frequency analysis to distinguish correct plaintext from invalid plaintext. This would make it easier to find out if you have successfully broken a cipher.

Understanding the language itself is of course off topic here - language studies / linguistics different from cryptanalysis. But if you have a newspaper then you can put it next to another newspaper with a language you know. You'd certainly find many articles that would have the same content, so you can use these newspapers as a Rosetta stone and "decipher" (most of) the language.



AFTER THE EDIT: Yes, you could certainly perform - for instance - frequency analysis to establish which language constructs are used often and where. This can help deciphering the language. But I presume that it will only result in statistical knowledge of the text.

Finding - for instance - the meaning of nouns will not be helped too much with this kind of analysis, you need to place the language structures in context for that.