Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

The interesting submitted article refers to "and as-yet undeciphered writing," but there is considerable controversy about whether or not the Indus Valley script

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

is a writing system at all, rather than the kind of ornamentation from a pre-proto-writing stage known in several other sites of ancient civilizations. (As a reality check, we can remember that several regions of the world had elaborate empires and cities with extensive trade routes but without writing.)

Some of the controversy about this issue arises because of the extreme sensitivity of cultural heritage claims in south Asia in a region that spans a heavily militarized border. A good popular book about the nature and origin of writing systems in general, worldwide, is Visible Speech by John DeFrancis,

http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...

and the definitive compilation of international research on writing systems to the date of publication is The World's Writing Systems

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright and published in 1996. I haven't concluded absolutely that the Indus Valley Script could not be a writing system, but there is no sure evidence that it is, and the earliest attested writing system in a nearby region is the Brahmi script

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script

that is much more recent in time (a few centuries older than the common era, that is approximately 2,300 years old) and unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East.

Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing vs. "a kind of ornamentation"? Your comment smacks of condescension but I'm sure you can just provide citations. Your (wikipedia) article contains some arguments based on relative frequency of symbols, but is controverted by studies of modern pictographic languages with similar characteristic (e.g. Chinese.)

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165

You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please?

The real controversial implication, IMHO, of studying ancient Indian languages is that Sanskrit (used over thousands of years and refined by rigid grammar rules by e.g. Panini 500 B.C.) may actually be the language from which Latin, and hence many European Romantic languages, developed.

http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-eu...

That's probably worth diving into, if you are genuinely curious. As the Welsh linguist Sir William Jones said,

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

[edit- link added and fluff redacted. :)]

> You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please?

Brahmi and Karoshthi (the two major origin scripts for the writing systems of the subcontinent) are generally accepted to be related to the Semitic writing systems.

Source: an undergraduate class in writing systems several years ago; also, the relevant Wikipedia pages agree, giving Aramaic as the parent script.

Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing

Yes. Again, this is a familiar issue to people who are familiar with linguistics, and one of the criticisms of the Rao et al. publication is that none of the authors are familiar with the methodology used in historical linguistics to solve comparable problems in other parts of the world. (I am able to read ancient Chinese and am intimately familiar with the history of the Chinese script, which is an illuminating example for comparing periods of early ornamentation, proto-writing, and full writing as that script developed with attested archeological finds.) I am also very familiar with the extent of the Indo-European languages and with the fact that many languages spoken in India (e.g., Tamil, a language spoken by many friends of mine) are not Indo-European. The links I already provided give much of the needed background information.

But here are a few more links, for onlookers who are curious about this issue and may be interested in responses to the Rao et al. publication.

http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf

http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf

http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao...

http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic...

(The link immediately above is by a former president of the Society for Computational Linguistics.)

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011

(The review article linked above from the journal Computational Linguistics discussed the methodological issues involved.)

Why did you leave out Rao's rebuttal to Farmer and friends' unabashed ad-hominmen laced pieces that you have given?

Rao's reply in Computational Linguistics: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusCompLing.pdf

Also other articles at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusResponse.html

Edit 1.

An aside:

Being a logic student who uses probabilistic machine learning, Farmer's use of the words refutation, proof etc. make me despair. This web page is an example:

http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html

Rao is much more careful and nuanced in his methods. Using time-tested logic and math. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/ScienceIndus.pdf

" As clearly stated in the last sentence of the paper, our results provide evidence which, given the rich syntactic structure in the script (and other evidence as listed below), increases the probability that the script represents language."

It seems to me that at least 50% of this controversy is a culture clash between computational linguists and historical linguists.

It's a little odd to describe the Rao paper as using time-tested logic and math when the idea of conditional entropy as an indicator of whether a given symbol system is linguistic is in no way time-tested. I'm not a professional linguist, and it may well be a valid and interesting technique, but it is not time-tested.

How do you time-test models with a strictly limited and static set of test cases? Any scheme would suffer from over-training. Maybe we have to evaluate approaches using logic and math e.g. conditional entropy to attack problems spaces like this.

The Indus Valley script doesn't look like a mere form of ornamentation to me (knowing something about archaeology and historical linguistics). The problem though is that when we say "writing" we usually mean "encoding otherwise spoken language in durable form" and there is no real evidence that this is what the Indus Valley script does.

The problem is that there are plenty of kinds of markings that don't fall under either of these. Take for example Roman Numerals. You aren't encoding IX or VIIII as the word "nine" or equivalent in any language. Instead You are illustrating the number on a tally stick and the tally stick, rather than the spoken language, acts as the shared point of reference.

So I think one has to be careful about saying that these are the only two options. The script could have a communicative function and even a formally defined one (much like Roman Numerals do) without being writing in the sense of encoding spoken language in durable form.

> when we say "writing" we usually mean "encoding otherwise spoken language in durable form"

Isn't Chinese an obvious counterexample? The Bible say in the beginning was the verb but for Chinese characters the main view is that the speech encoding part has been added later.

But people writing Chinese are still encoding spoken Chinese in an ideographic system. It's not a phonetic system or even close. But it's still a written representation of the spoken language.

It's not a mainstream position in linguistics that Sanskrit is a direct ancestor language of Latin. The overwhelmingly most popular theory is that both are ultimately descended from different branches of proto-European. Latin is from th centum branch and Sanskrit is from the satem branch (which includes Proto-Slavic as well). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centum-Satem_isogloss

The blog you cite shows serious signs of crackpotterry, as do its comments.

> crackpotterry

My new favorite word!

Agreed. Also note that the (Latin) Centum (pronounced Ken-tum) form has to be overall an older form than Satam due to the missing consonants and palatization noted in the latter.

The current thinking as far as I can tell is that Indo-Iranian (basically the ancestor of Sanscrit and Avestan) was the latest branch to break off of common Indo-European, though I think these models always oversimplify.

The most archaic attested Indo-European language is actually Hittite, possibly followed by Tocharian.

I also find it strange that historians cannot accept that the extremely complex language of sanskrit is not accepted as the origin of latin and european languages. The study of it takes years and is very fine tuned. Yet so called historians say there is a 'proto' language which is before it which has mysteriously disappeared. Unless you agree with this hypothesis, you will have no chance of going anywhere in common academic circles.

Well, there is some controversy, not considerable. But I think that mostly stems from the fact that no one has been able to decipher it yet.

But computer analysis and all was done recently to strongly suggest this is indeed a script rather than some kind of ornamentation.

Please refer to the following TED talk by one of the scientists who worked on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...

Wasn't there a mathematical study that concluded that the Indus script has the structure of a language? I found an article on it http://grimoires.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/grim-writing-the-i...

Ah I didnt see your comment, but I added the TED talk which talks about this in the thread, up above. I hope this doesn't constitute spamming, but here is the link.

http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...

"structure of a language" is a pretty vague claim. Arguably one could conclude that Roman Numerals have the structure of a language too, but I wouldn't conclude from such a claim that roman numerals encode spoken language in durable form. Rather they are communicative in function, but through an illustrative rather than spoken frame of reference (Roman Numerals illustrate positions on a tally stick).

Part of the problem is determining what we mean by writing. Keep in mind we don't see any long inscriptions of the sort we see in early Sanscrit or Hittite. Only a few areas are attested including stamp seals, pottery and the like.

The Indus Valley script could have been, for example, a pictographic/ideographic labelling system without any real language-encoding function. But if I draw thee fish to indicate that you owe me three fish, is that writing? It's certainly encoded communications. I don't know that it is writing as we know it though.

Since these are all hypotheses, and no one has cracked the script yet for good, (at least where in all are in consent), I would suggest that these are looked from the Proto-Dravidian hypothesis as well. See the following links: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500... The above is Iravadham Mahadevan's view.

The following two are Asko Parpola's contributions:

http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html http://www.amazon.com/Deciphering-Indus-Script-Asko-Parpola/...

I wonder if it is possible to tell ornamentation from writing from the degree of entropy present. For instance, if it is easily compressed, then it is probably writing, as opposed to ornamentation - which will like be random.

Why would ornamentation be random? Actually, a lot of ornamentation (patterns on rugs, clothing, buildings, etc) one sees is more regular than writing.

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