Is it possible to make sense of an unknown language by means of cryptanalysis? I was wondering if it was possible to make any sense from an unknown language by using cryptanalysis. My premises are: suppose an analyst that knows nothing about a language (let's suppose chinese but it can be any other as long as it totally unknown to the analyst), but you do know it's a language (in order to avoid responses like codex seraphinianus) and you can have as much samples of the language as you want (imagine literature, tweets, newspapers, ...)

EDIT: This question came to my mind because I read some time ago about how Americans in WWII used navajo speakers to carry coded messages, hence my interest in trying to solve the problem by cryptanalysis. Also, I'm aware that navajo isn't a written language, but I wanted to assume it in my example for simplicity
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.