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Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

Only 6500 years? That's incredibly recent for such an influential language. For comparison, Sargon of Akkad died only 4000 years ago, and there are written records from him. True, he didn't speak Indo-European, but Afroasiatic/Akkadian, and that was the language on those cuneiform tablets the researchers used for reference.

On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around...

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The oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite who used to live in Bronze Age Anatolian Steppe. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.

Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

> On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around

The irony is that even with AI we have yet to decode Indus script perhaps due to the lack of the equivalent of Rosetta Stone [1]. I think there's a Nobel prize waiting for those who can decipher the Indus script with AI or not [2].

[1] Rosetta Stone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

[2] Indus script:

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

I believe the article is saying that the Hittite branch split off early from the rest of the tree, and the Yamnaya are the ones that spread it around the world -- the Hittite branch ended up being a dead end.

The main point of the article was that the Hittite spoke an IE language (evidence from their cuneiform writing), but their DNA doesn't have any Yamnaya ancestry. So, two conflicting points. What the article describes is that they have found an ancient population which they call "the Caucasus Lower Volga people", and their DNA is present in the Yamnaya AND the Hittites, as I understand it. So the hypothesis is that these people spoke an early proto-IE language, and some of them migrated to where the Hittites originated, and others moved west and intermixed with a small region in what is today the southern part of Ukraine, and in a few villages of a few thousand people a whole new economy was developed and this is what eventually spread out as the "steppe migration", bringing proto-IE with them.

So, the base of the article is that they found a population which appears to be ancestral to both the Yamnaya and the Hittites, and that the latter split off before that population became the Yamnaya by migrating elsewhere and merge with people there. What's missing is definite proof that the "Caucasus Lower Volga" people actually spoke proto-proto-IE, but if they didn't then things look even more complex. If they did it would match the current linguistic and DNA evidence pretty well.

Regarding Indus script: I’ve recently come across this purported attempt by someone who claims they’ve deciphered Indus script. I’m. It not sold on it but it is making some waves in Indian circles.

https://indusscript.net/

That's a Hindu Nationalist website and a claim. They forcefully fit Indus Script into Sanskrit, to try to outflank the Aryan Invasion Theory. It is not making anywhere but only in Brahmin circles.

Like I said, I am not sold on the idea because it seems like curve fitting to me. However in the spirit of scientific inquiry, we should allow them to share their ideas.

Purely based on the content of the website, I fail to see anywhere on the website allusions to Hindu Nationalism. The website contains a paper from acadamia.edu showing their analysis. Lastly the claim about "Brahmin circles" also seems malicious because it is being discussed on mainstream media like CNN-News18 or IIT Hyderabad.

https://www.academia.edu/78867798/A_cryptanalytic_decipherme...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQa2ol6w7lg

What else it is other than Hindu Nationalistic when It says Indus script is Sanskrit?

This blind hate against Sanskrit is really sad.

Sanskrit is a language that goes beyond Hinduism. Almost all important Buddhist Sutras and influential works like Mulamadhyamakkarika or Jaina works like Tattvartha Sutra are in Sanskrit.

Lastly Sanskrit is also the language of many secular works like Siddhanta Shiromani, Sushruta Samhita, Kama Sutra or Abhigyanashakuntalam.

This has nothing to do with the fascist movement trying to force indus into their conception of sanskrit.

Projection is hell of a drug.

The problem with that "decipherment", from what I've been told by others who are far more educated than I am, is that it does the equivalent of deciphering Anglo-Saxon runnic texts by using modern slang like "yo" in order for it to work out.

As a non-linguist, non-Sankrit speaker I can't evaluate those claims, but considering that this script declines as the Indus Valley Civilization fades away, along with the arrival of Indo-European speakers who would be more likely to speak the ancestor language of Sanskrit, I'd be highly skeptical of these claims.

If the script is a full writing system, and I were forced to guess what a future decipherment might find, it wouldn't surprise me to see that the language is related to the Dravidian languages.

Hopefully more examples of the writing will be found so that we may one day know for sure.

I learned Sanskrit as a kid and I’m familiar with Dravidian languages as well. They’ve heavily influenced and assimilated each other’s features. Although there are no attestations of Dravidian languages before 5th C BCE, we never know what future discoveries might tell about its connection to IVC, if any.

If we can decipher letters from burnt, rolled up scrolls, I’m sure eventually we’ll figure out what IVCs writings meant.

There is no need to outflank Aryan Invasion Theory. Invasion theory is dead and buried. Now it goes my migration theory.

btw why is it wrong for Hindus to say about their history. Should we allow only White Christian historians? Critic the text not the person. Please stop with outdated racist views.

The problem with Indus script is that the inscriptions are all very short. This gives you very little information to go on.

English is what? ~600-800 years old? Most other major Western European languages only developed over the past ~2000 years or so.

It’s not like Porto Indo-European developed out of nothing. It was related to other languages that just didn’t survive and happens to be the most recent (hypothesized) common ancestor of all other Indo-European languages)

> final decades of our species

Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting.

>Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting [emphasis mine].

Speaking of bubbles, how sure are you that Silicon Valley and HN are not part of a bubble composed of people with an emotional attachment to technological progress and people with a financial stake in AI?

How sure are you that the AI labs aren't being even more irresponsible than the news media?

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree it's a provocation and, worse, a generic tangent, but the rest of the comment was pretty good.

I know you have no time, and I don't need a response. I have no skin in this exchange either, fwiw. But I just want to try to unpack here how this could be either a provocation or a noteworthy tangent. Is it that being pessimistic about the future is flamebait? Is it perhaps sneering? Is there anything to be said about the rest of the sentence in question and how its clearly just being a little cheeky? Or is that perhaps whats wrong with it?

Just feels perhaps a little out of place this time that the gp would be in the wrong at all here. But I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

Generic references to "the advent of AI" are already flamebait (ok, proto-flamebait) because the topic is so hot, discussed, and divisive. But casually dropping "and the final decades of our species" as an assumed fact, sort of like the decline of CDs or something, is definitely a provocation. It's unsurprising that someone got activated and then we were off down a generic flamewar tangent.

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