
After a century failing to crack an ancient script, linguists turn to machines - seycombi
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14371450/indus-valley-civilization-ancient-seals-symbols-language-algorithms-ai
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ktRolster
The academic enmity in this field, between published authors, is huge and
entertaining. These quotes from the article:

 _Wells’ beef with Witzel goes all the way back to his PhD dissertation on the
Indus script, which Witzel tried to block, according to Wells. Later, while
escorting Witzel through India, Wells would show him a PowerPoint presentation
entitled “Ten reasons you don’t know what you’re talking about” while in the
back of a cab._

and

 _“You would be better off getting medical advice from your garbage man than
you would getting ideas about the Indus script from listening to Steve
Farmer,”_

~~~
tn13
Witzel comes across as a deeply racist person. I am told that he told an
Indian person that "Hindus cant get a chair professorship to study Indology
because they will be biased!". He has a long history of viciously attacking
other scholars who try to criticize his work in academic fashion.

Having said that his book on world mythology is excellent.

~~~
merdreubu
>Witzel comes across as a deeply racist person. I am told that he told an
Indian person that "Hindus cant get a chair professorship to study Indology
because they will be biased!".

That's not racism.

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NelsonMinar
Indus Script is not currently in Unicode. There was a proposal in 1999 with
about 250 code points.
[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n1959.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n1959.pdf)

~~~
ktRolster
til there is unicode for egyptian heiroglyph:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_\(Unicode_block\))

~~~
NelsonMinar
Ideally all writing systems will eventually be in Unicode. It's a lot of work
for historical systems though.

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Isamu
The problem, as TFA points out, is that 1) the inscriptions are short, on
average 5 symbols, 2) the underlying language and even the language family is
unknown.

Most (all?) decipherments have relied on having an idea of the language at
least. What we have here are lots of seals with a bit of text, not paragraphs
with real structure to analyze, maybe not even sentences.

Since they are seals, maybe they are mostly labels identifying the owner, or
maybe some transactional label. In which case you will be hard pressed to
extract a language from them. You probably will need longer examples to make
progress.

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empath75
If it does encode different languages in different places, like cuneiform, it
might be worthwhile focusing on inscriptions found on the fringes, like in
Iraq. Maybe some of them are actually Sumerian inscriptions or something like
that.

~~~
ktRolster
The article suggests that the major impediment to solving the puzzle is
funding, presumably for more archeological digs, and finding more clues.

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ishi
I find it surprising that only in the past few years someone started to use
statistical analysis (Markov, bigrams, trigrams) on this script. These are
techniques that have been in use by cryptanalists for decades. Sounds like
something very basic that you would do in the initial efforts to analyze any
ancient script.

~~~
ar-jan
Not necessarily. IIRC, people trying to decipher Mayan glyphs with
cryptanalytic methods were set on the wrong track and got nowhere, because a
script is actually meant to communicate language, not to hide the message.

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aakilfernandes
The headline reminds me of this

[http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html](http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html)

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kylebgorman
As a professional linguist, I think that Farmer et al. are probably right and
it's almost surely not a "writing system" at all. (This is a term of art with
a very specific sense.)

~~~
waqf
> _(This is a term of art with a very specific sense.)_

Would you care to enlighten us?

~~~
stan_rogers
It's about productivity. If it's purely pictographic or idiographic, it can
only encode precisely what the symbols mean. When cuneiform, for instance,
went from its early pictographic/ideographic stage to a rhyme, rebus and
initial stage, it went from being just a "tagging" system to an actual writing
system, where anything that could be said could be encoded.

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osoba
So a Google search tells me this is supposed to be the unicorn
[http://i.imgur.com/cdbIpEd.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/cdbIpEd.jpg)

Could it simply be some sort of rope/wire wrapped around the animals head with
some wooden/metal rod used for steering? There seems to be a saddle too?

~~~
35bge57dtjku
Could it just be they only drew a single antler/horn?

~~~
osoba
Or it's a side image and one antler obscures the other

~~~
nol13
clearly a tachash

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scottmf
I was hoping this would be about the Voynich manuscript

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript)

~~~
Pxtl
I still like Xkcd's theory best:

[https://xkcd.com/593/](https://xkcd.com/593/)

