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by mcswell
37 days ago
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"...it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script..." No, it has NOT been proven to be a writing system for a language. Indeed the very link you cite [1] says: "... difficult to judge whether or not they [the Indus symbols] constituted a writing system used to record a Harappan language..." "There are doubts whether the Indus script records a written language or is instead a system of non-linguistic signs or proto-writing similar to merchant's marks and house marks, and to the contemporary accounting tokens and numerical clay tablets of Mesopotamia. Due to the brevity of inscriptions, some researchers have questioned whether Indus symbols can even express a spoken language." In sum, whether it's a writing system for some language is still debated. |
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Actually I was reffering to a 2011 TED Talk on Youtube by a researcher in this field namely Rajesh Rao a computational neuroscientist, entitled "Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus script." It's based on the comparison of the statistical distribution and entropy to other well-known languages such as English, Sumerian, and Old Tamil, as well as non-linguistic systems such as DNA sequences, Fortran programming code, and completely random sequences [1].
The researcher personally received a death threat due to this discovery. Why is the discovery or the hypothesis (depending on your perspective) is very controversial, is telling something. My conjecture is that the Dravidian speaking people is displaced further south to the Indian subcontinent by the "newcomers" (Aryan speaking people), similar to how the Wales/Welsh speaking people was driven further eastword in the British Island by the "newcomers" (English speaking people).
[1] Rajesh Rao: Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus script [video]:
https://youtu.be/kwYxHPXIaao