The Issue of the Indus Valley Script

A recently published (by Rao et al.) paper in Science was much talked about by the media. This paper contained a statistical proof that the pictorial markings on the walls of ruins from the Indus Valley Civilization were, in fact, sentences from a language similar to any that people use today.

Initially I was puzzled at this - haven't we always been talking about the Indus language and script and stuff like that? Was there any doubt on that score? Apparently, doubt was cast on the literacy of the ancient dravidians as recently as 2004...

To put it in Dr Rahul Siddharthan's words is much more exciting than for me to explain, for it offers not just a flavour of how math can enter language (that's strictly for the mathematically enabled souls, don't write fan mail if you can't see some sentences through to the end, I couldn't either) but also an insight into how science happens, how scientists talk, etc..

Here it is...

"Here is my feeling on what has happened here: Before 2004, the Rao et al. paper would not have gathered any attention. (Of course the Indus system is a language script! Why are you discussing it?) But that year, Steve Farmer managed to persuade two others -- one of whom, Michael Witzel, is a well-respected authority in the field -- to add their names to his thesis that it is not a language. The resulting manuscript was absurdly and unprofessionally bombastic in its language, while containing essentially nothing convincing. Regardless of the work of Rao et al, their hypothesis would have died a natural death -- but Rao et al do have Farmer et al to thank for enabling them to publish their work, with its obvious conclusions, in a prestigious journal like Science. Farmer et al are so rattled that they promptly post an incoherent, shrill, content-free, ad hominem rant on Farmer's website. Sproat even shows up on my previous post, leaving a chain of comments that reveal that he has neither understood, nor cares to understand, the argument. All those who dissent from their 2004 paper are Dravidian nationalists...."

The full text can be found here -

http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-indus-thoughts-and-links.html