Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

> Reminds me of the also unbroken Indus script. With all this computational power, I'm surprised that we haven't been able to crack ancient proto-writing.

Attempts to crack the Indus script with the aid of computers have been made since at least the 1970s (a large Soviet team went to work on it then), but the problem is that the Indus script may not actually encode the sounds of a language. If it is essentially a set of tamgas or decorative elements, then it cannot be cracked. And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.

View on HN

> And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.

I feel this conclusion rather weak.

As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed [1]. Another one is the hieroglyphs.

Re-constructing how mayan words sounded is still on-going [2].

Also, this type of work is not really possible to "crack with computers" as some have suggested (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment

2: https://decipherment.wordpress.com/

The people that decoded the mayan language had the advantage of having several actively spoken maya languages to work from.

> As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed

That is no counterexample. The Mayan written language was related to a number of surviving languages, making decipherment easier.

> Another one is the hieroglyphs.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs could not be deciphered until the discovery of the Rosetta stone, where the hieroglyphic text was accompanied by translations into Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Before that, there had been attempts for many centuries to decipher the hieroglyphs but they proved fruitless.

The main problem as I understand is that although there are a thousand examples of Indus texts, the longest one is 17 characters. And there are no bilingual inscriptions.

But I do wonder if there isn't a side channel, or just some way of doing it without requiring the usual necessary elements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com