[humility]

Oh my, I've wondered about this a lot since I come from a Sanskrit background and I love etymology. I'm also cataloguing the superb similarities between Sanskrit and English despite several mutations spanning millennia.

The optimist in me thinks this is the written script for an early version of Proto-Indo-European. Would love to see what like minded people think :)

[arnsholt]

Anything IE is extremely unlikely as a language for the Indus seals; it only really fits with an out of India model of Indo-European, which is outright rejected by all serious scholars AFAIK. If we're going to look for contemporary relatives of the Indus language, the serious candidate is Dravidian. The Dravidian family was in India around the right time, and was definitely spoken in a larger area prior to the Aryan invasions.

[hasmanean]

I don’t think the Indus Valley seals are a script at all. They might be more like corporate logos.

Try deciphering the english language from a bunch of billboards and pop/cans. Even if you figure out the alphabet there aren’t enough words to construct a single sentence.

All the AI in the universe won’t help when the problem is lack of real data.

[arnsholt]

Well, names and titles are still language, but I agree with your actual point: the Indus inscriptions seem to be too short and probably not general enough to allow an in-depth understanding without finding new, longer texts.

[mcswell]

That was Sproat et al's point. (Sorry, I can't remember the other authors, I just happen to know Richard Sproat.)

[robinsoh]

> I come from a Sanskrit background

Meaning a scholar of Sanskrit or something else?

> The optimist in me thinks this is the written script for an early version of Proto-Indo-European

Optimist in what sense?

[humility]

> meaning a scholar of Sanskrit or something else? I studied Sanskrit for 5 years in middle school, so I'm familiar with more than the basics.

> Optimist in what sense The one who wants to see a script for PIE discovered :)

[robinsoh]

> The one who wants to see a script for PIE discovered :)

I didn't quite understand. Is this related to what the article says: " The discovery of a civilization of people who lived before the Vedic people upended the story of India. Given that it undermines their claims of indigeneity, proponents of Hindutva — the most mainstream strain of Hindu nationalism — balk at the theory of a pre-Vedic civilization, even as evidence for it accumulates across disciplines, including archaeology, genetics, and linguistics. "

Is Sanskrit and Hindutva and PIE related?

[mcswell]

Hindutva is a political ideology; Sanskrit and PIE (Proto-Indo-European) were languages, with Sanskrit attested in written form (including an ancient grammar!), but PIE not attested--only reconstructed from the daughter Indo-European languages, Sanskrit being one of them. Sanskrit being rather old, it's closer to PIE than any of today's IE languages; it's very roughly contemporaneous with ancient Greek and Hittite, which are also IE languages.

[humility]

Tsakonian Greek :)

[humility]

I don't know how Hindutva is related to this discussion.

I'm just interested in this from a coherence point of view. I believe that learning a super language like PIE would help me understand a lot about human relation to language and vice versa.

[robinsoh]

The article mentioned Hindutva as I pasted. If I understand correctly, Hindutva people have a vested interest to want this script to be Sanskrit related as opposed to an indigenous Indian language. Is that correct?

[humility]

> If I understand correctly, Hindutva people have a vested interest to want this ....

Don't know, don't care about this 40 year old concept as much as I do for a 5000 year proto language.