Word: scripting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...written language comes about through this mix of built-in rules and flexible variables," says Mayank Vahia, an astrophysicist at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai who worked on the study. Quantifying this principle through computer probability tests, the scientists determined that the Harappan script had a similar measure of conditional entropy to other writing systems, including English, Sanskrit and Sumerian. If it mathematically looked and acted like writing, they concluded, then surely it is writing...
...impenetrable Indus signs. Their August paper charted the likelihood of certain characters appearing in parts of a text - for example, a fish sign appeared most frequently in the middle of a sequence and a U-shaped jar sign toward the end. Bit by bit, the structure of the script is coming into view. "We want to find the bedrock against which all further interpretation of the language should be checked," says Vahia. Down the road, he imagines he could write in "flawless Harappan" - even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences would mean. Rajesh Rao, an associate...
...doesn't help that, though long dead, the Harappan script sparks sometimes acrimonious debate in India over the nature of its origins. Scholars from southern India claim it ought to be linked to proto-Dravidian, the progenitor of languages like Tamil, while others think it is related to the Vedic Sanskrit of early Hinduism, the ancestor of Hindi and other languages spoken in India's north. And while cultural agendas within India have stymied collaborative efforts, the enmity between India and Pakistan has impeded archaeological breakthroughs. Ganeriwala, a desert site in Pakistan that possibly holds the ruins...
...tablets, remains undeciphered, shrouding the ancient culture in mystery. A code-busting artifact with bilingual text, like the Rosetta stone, has yet to be found. By some counts, more than 100 decipherments of the civilization's often anthropomorphic runes and signs - known in the field as the Harappan script - have been attempted over the decades, none with great success. Some archaeologists spied parallels with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia. Others speculated an unlikely link between Harappan signs and the similarly inscrutable "bird-men" glyphs found thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean on Easter Island...
...perhaps out of befuddlement and frustration, a group of scholars declared that the script marked only rudimentary pictograms and that the Indus Valley people were functionally illiterate. That hypothesis, which caused a minor uproar in the world of Indus Valley researchers, was recently rejected by a team of mathematicians and computer scientists assembled from institutions in the U.S. and India. That team's study, published initially in April in Science and more extensively in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, employed computer modeling to prove that the Harappan script communicated language, and has reinvigorated attempts...