Indus civilization signs

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

A propos yesterday's SCIENCE article <http://www.sciencemag.org.>

 

" Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script. "

By Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh

Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan. Science, Vol. 324

Issue 5926, April 24, 2009. (In the Brevia section: Published Online

April 23, 2009; Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391)

 

This less than 2 page paper is based on *invented* data; however,

this fact appears only if you actually read the additional materials,

not easily available, unless you have a subscription:

<http://www.sciencemag.org.ezp-prod1.hul/cgi/content/full/sci;1170391/

DC1>

 

Its conclusions about 'script', language etc. therefore are baseless,

wrong and misleading:

Garbage in, garbage out, as has been reported by www.newscientist.com.

 

Instead, see our (S. Farmer, R. Sproat, M. Witzel) brief refutation,

published on the same day as the Rao paper, at:

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

 

----------

 

SOME INITIAL DETAILS:

 

Rao et al. somehow managed to get through the review process at

Science, though it took them 4 months to do so.

 

They did so by failing to indicate in their paper proper that their

" representative examples of nonlinguistic signs " are *made-up*

corpora. These " non-linguistic signs " lie at the center of their

argument (i.e., that Indus signs are *not* nonlinguistic). But,

their Type 1 and Type 2 systems of signs (tokens) are radically

different from anything found in the real world.

 

If they had said that openly in their paper the paper would never

have been published.

And, if the press releases had noted that people would not have been

misled.

 

Instead, they barely indicate the " assumed " nature of their data, and

this only in their online " Supplemental Information " , which very few

people will see -- and certainly not those who merely follow the

current news and internet tsunami.

 

If they had calculated the 'conditional entropy' (certain signs

necessarily following others) of ANY *real* nonlinguistic symbol

system, they would instead have found that there are frequent

statistical overlaps with linguistic systems. Not unexpectedly also

with the Indus symbols. In fact, real world nonlinguistic signs will

fall somewhere in the middle: no sign system is either totally

disordered or totally disordered.

 

We (Farmer, Sproat, WItzel) have already shown precisely that for

symbol frequencies in our 2004 paper that they supposedly refute.

See: <http://www.safarmer/fsw2.pdf> (see the chart on p. 27)

 

Again, if they had calculated the entropy of any genuine, not made

up, " representative nonlinguistic symbols " they would have found that

they looked much like writing as well. Take a look the Scottish

heraldic signs in our paper.

 

-----

 

There are many more technical arguments than the ones we list in our

little Refutation -- involving gross misuse of the concept of

conditional entropy, language structure, attestation and localization

of ancient Sumerian, Vedic and Tamil, etc. -- that we can lay out in

a little piece later.

 

In the margin: the Rao, et al. paper is depends on an article by

Claude Shannon " A Mathematical Theory of Communication, " in The Bell

System Technical Journal 27 (1948), pp 379-423 and 623-656. See the

employment

of the phrase: " conditional entropy. "

Rao, et.al., however, do not even bother to give the title of this

article in their bibliography. The Shannon article is available here

(see esp. pp. 14-15 of that study):

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf

 

 

More to come SOON.

 

----------

 

Amusingly, even A. Parpola, who has spent most of his career on the

'decipherment' of the Indus signs, the so-called Indus script,

comments:

 

" It's a useful paper, " said University of Helsinki archaeologist Asko

Parpola, an authority on Indus scripts, " but it doesn't really

further our understanding of the script. "

 

Parpola said the primary obstacle confronting decipherers of

fragmentary Indus scripts — the difficulty of testing their

hypotheses — remains unchanged. " (see: <http://blog.wired.com/

wiredscience/2009/04/indusscript.html>

 

And the Guardian, in rather garbled fashion, has him say:

" " Language is one of the hallmarks of a literate civilisation. If

it's real writing, we have a chance to know their language and to get

to know more about their religion and other aspects of their culture.

We don't have any literature from the region that can be understood. "

 

To my mind at least, language is a hallmark of ANY human culture,

whether hunter-gatherer or state society...

 

Others however, who have equally been heavily involved in this futile

exercise, such as the Indus archaeologist M. Kenoyer, are even less

cautious:

 

" J. Mark Kenoyer, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

says Rao's paper is worth publishing, but time will tell if the

technique sheds light on the nature of Indus script. " At present they

are lumping more than 700 years of writing into one data set, " he

says. " I am actually going to be working with them on the revised

analysis, and we will see how similar or different it is from the

current results. " <http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17012-

scholars-at-odds-over-mysterious-indus-script.html>

 

None of them, apparently, has read the supplementary materails

carefully. O si tacuisses...

 

I will tell him so in our May Round Table at Kyoto, where Indus

specialists will get together from Japan, S. Asia, America. Perhaps

he will then rethink this " working together " with them...

 

By the way, Kenoyer is an earth digging archaeologist, not a

linguist -- not by any stretch of imagination :^)

 

 

Conclusion: read the " footnotes " carefully, not the hype.

Cheers!

MW

 

> Michael Witzel

 

witzel

<www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm>

 

Dept. of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University

1 Bow Street,

Cambridge MA 02138, USA

 

phone: 1- 617 - 495 3295 (voice & messages), 496 8570, fax 617 - 496

8571;

my direct line: 617- 496 2990

 

 

============

Michael Witzel

witzel

<www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm>

 

Dept. of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University

1 Bow Street,

Cambridge MA 02138, USA

 

phone: 1- 617 - 495 3295 (voice & messages), 496 8570, fax 617 - 496

8571;

my direct line: 617- 496 2990

 

 

============

Michael Witzel

witzel

<www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm>

 

Dept. of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University

1 Bow Street,

Cambridge MA 02138, USA

 

phone: 1- 617 - 495 3295 (voice & messages), 496 8570, fax 617 - 496

8571;

my direct line: 617- 496 2990

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

--- शनि, 25/4/09 को, Michael Witzel <witzel ने

लिखा:

 

> By the way,  Kenoyer is an earth digging

> archaeologist, not a 

> linguist --  not  by any stretch of imagination

> :^)

 

Well, Massimo Vidale would say that this cuts both ways.

 

Phillip

Pune

 

 

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