I'm currently working with a team of linguists in New South Wales, Australia trying to revive the native language of the Sydney-Newcastle area (extinct since the late 19th century). We're trying to piece together the grammar and syntax using translated Bibles from the early to mid 1800s. However, "meaning" was the main problem - most of the social structures in Biblical Middle Eastern society and their related vocabulary - words like "king", "prophet" and "messiah" - represent concepts alien to the Aboriginals of Australia. We discovered that the English missionary tasked with learning the language and spreading the Gospel there had partially given up and just used Greek, Latin and Aramaic words when there was no native equivalent available and inserted those words into an otherwise grammatical sentence. What this meant was that Aboriginals had a hard time being converted - they barely understood the Bible translation! That, and the fact that the missionaries were not able to hear the differences in certain sounds in the local languages that were crucial to distinguishing words, And now, almost 200 years later, linguists like myself are having a tough time sorting out the whole mess!