tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post5532371483160231163..comments2024-03-06T13:50:29.718+05:30Comments on E's flat, ah's flat too: Indus: What did Rao et al. really do?Rahul Siddharthanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-30542384050298926442009-05-01T15:47:00.000+05:302009-05-01T15:47:00.000+05:30Mr. Farmer claims that the Indus Valley seals are
...Mr. Farmer claims that the Indus Valley seals are<br />far too brief to record any meaningful information.<br />This contention has no linguistic validity. A<br />sentence is a combination of selected syntactic items<br />arranged or modified in a particular pattern. The<br />number of signs used to write a particular sentence it<br />can not define the literacy of a sentence. A sentence<br />has meaning solely on the basis of the content of the<br />syntactic elements of that sentence. For example, in<br />Arabic we have kitab kita-b ‘he wrote (a) book’. In<br />English we have,<br />1. They came.<br />2. They saw her.<br />3. It is Jack.<br />All of these sentence have few words but they do have<br />meaning.<br />The presence of a limited number of signs on a<br />seal has nothing to do with the meaning of that seal.<br />This results from the fact that the Indus Valley signs<br />are homophones, that have varying meanings.<br />It is no secret that the Indus Valley signs are<br />almost identical to signs found on the Egyptian<br />pottery , and signs in the Minoan, Proto-Sumerian and<br />Proto-Elamite writing systems . This is very<br />interesting because, some researchers such as I.J.<br />Gelb in A Study of Writing (Chicago: University of<br />Chicago Press,1963), believe that some other group<br />besides the Sumerians invented the cuneiform script<br />used by the Sumerians.<br />The study of ancient writing systems makes it<br />clear that in many scripts, e.g., cuneiform and<br />Egyptian two or more signs can have the same<br />pronunciation. For example, in Sumerian there are 22<br />different signs that were used to represent the<br />syllable du.<br />In the cuneiform system there is no distinction<br />between voiceless, voiced and emphatic consonants. As<br />a result, the sign ga, can be read as ka and qa.<br />In Sumerian there are many homophones. As a<br />result, in many ancient language a term can be not<br />only an adjective or demonstrative, it may also<br />represent both a verb and noun. Each Sumerian<br />cuneiform sign represents a monosyllabic CV (consonant<br />vowel) or VC term. These Sumerian terms have multiple<br />meanings:<br />U, cock,; totality; to ride, to steer;<br />Ig, dike; embankment; to water; to say; this one;<br />Ul, joy, pleasure; to glitter, shine; remote,<br />distance;<br />An, sky; the god An; to be high; high; in front;<br />En, dignitary, lord; to rule; noble; until;<br />Ur , to surround; dog; to tremble; humble; liver,<br />spleen; it, these, thus; so.<br />The varying meanings of these homophonic terms, that<br />can be represented by one or more cuneiform signs,<br />make it clear that the combination of several<br />cuneiform signs can be written to provide meaningful<br />statements in a short text. Below are some Sumerian<br />examples:<br />Ash ti en ‘ Wish for a noble life’.<br />Zi eš , (This) Righteous shrine.<br />I po tu , ‘Capture the pure libation’.<br />Pa ge ki, ‘Girls take an oath (this) place’.<br />Mi lu du, ‘This (is) a favorable oracle of the<br />people’.<br />Given the fact that meaningful statements can be made<br />through the combination of a few cuneiform signs, make<br />it clear that the Indus Valley seals , even though<br />they contain a limited number of signs can express<br />literate, meaningful statements contrary to the<br />opinion of Steve Farmer.Dr. Clyde Wintershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01153945762719431061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-83900070912962636912009-05-01T15:45:00.000+05:302009-05-01T15:45:00.000+05:30The argument about the presence of singletons in
t...The argument about the presence of singletons in<br />the Indus Valley writing says nothing about the<br />literacy of the Indus Valley seals. This results from<br />the fact that although the new sign (or singleton)<br />found in a seal text may not occur in other seals, the<br />singleton is usually made up of a combination of two<br />or more of the seventy basic Indus Valley signs to<br />form a “new” sign or singleton.<br />The Oracle Bone writing confirms this view. In<br />the Oracle Bone writing we see a number of signs that<br />are formed by two or more symbols.<br />L. Wieger, in Chinese Characters (New York:<br />Dover Publications: 1965) we learn that the Chinese<br />writing system is based on 224 Primitive Chinese signs<br />called Gu wen , these graphemes are joined together to<br />make new words.<br />The Gan zhi or cyclical graphs are among some of<br />the most ancient Chinese symbols. There are 22 signs<br />in the Gan zhi . David N. Knightley, in Sources of<br />Shang History : The oracle-bone inscriptions of Bronze<br />Age China (Berkeley: University of California Press,<br />1978) notes that these signs have been used from<br />ancient times up to the modern period. The Gan zhi<br />signs are joined together to form new words, e.g. the<br />yi symbol and the symbol for ‘pit’, are joined<br />together to make the word Xiung ‘accident , unlucky’.<br />David Knightley, has made it clear that while we<br />may find hundreds of Oracle Bone inscriptions there<br />were only 42 signs frequently used in the writing.<br />These 42 signs, along with a number of pictographic<br />signs were combined to one another and used to make<br />the corpus of Oracle Bone inscriptions. Because these<br />inscriptions were written for divining purposes, the<br />terms used in this genre was associated with<br />divinations and prognostications. As a result, as the<br />writing was used for other purposes the Chinese had to<br />invent new signs or singletons based on the Gan zhi<br />and Gu wen signs to record new types of information,<br />for a writing system used originally for divination.<br />Over time, these singletons would become high<br />frequency terms as they were used more frequently.Dr. Clyde Wintershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01153945762719431061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-80181807798133943662009-05-01T15:40:00.000+05:302009-05-01T15:40:00.000+05:30Farmer and I debated his theory on the illiteracy ...Farmer and I debated his theory on the illiteracy of the Harappans months before he and his colleagues published their paper. A list of our comments can be found here<br /><br />http://groups.yahoo.com/group/akandabaratam/message/14321<br /><br /><br />You are right about Sp determined to ignore Rao’s work based on his intention to represent his theory that the Harappans were illiterate as valid. This results from the fact that in the original Farmer paper, the researchers had attempted to use Zifp Law to prove that the Harappans were illiterate. I shortthis theory down so they removed this point from the paper they later published. I pointed out that the data they present in their paper does indeed fit Zifp’s Law.<br /><br /><br />http://groups.yahoo.com/group/akandabaratam/message/11097<br /><br /><br />I later published this and other evidence disputing their theory in 2005.<br /><br /> C. Winters, “ The Indus Valley Writing is evidence of ancient Dravidian literacy, International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 35(1), pp.139-152 (2005) <br /> A cursory examination of the article by Farmer et al, by any competent researchers betrays its groundlessness. There are three variables in the study 1) literacy (independent<br />variable) and three dependent variables 1) relative frequency of the signs,2)the brevity of most inscriptions and 3)lack of evidence for an archaeological manuscript traditions. The first two dependent falsified by Farmer themselves. They maintain that brief inscriptions and limited number of signs on various medium is an indication of illiteracy. They contradict themselves in their own paper when they mention the fact that the average symbol length for Egyptian (6.94) and Indus (7.39) text are almost identical means. This along with the fact that Dreyer has found that Egyptian clay tablets with only two signs have phonemic meaning make it clear that if these text have phonemic and literate meaning the same is probably true of the Indus Valley writing.<br /><br />Secondly, Farmer et al argue that their is not manuscript tradition for Indus writing. This is untrue, we see the continue use of signs similar to those in the Indus script from Harappan times, into the South India megalithic on into the Brahmi script. It was B.B. Lal's discovery of South India pottery with Harappan signs that allowed us to see the<br />direction in which Harappan writing was written.<br /><br />The fact that very brief text exist of as few as two (2) signs, that have phonemic literate meaning show that the hypothesis and variables of Farmer et al lacks internal and external validity.Dr. Clyde Wintershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01153945762719431061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-42750148851113374882009-05-01T12:23:00.000+05:302009-05-01T12:23:00.000+05:30Kalyanaraman: I'd say a script must be a written r...Kalyanaraman: I'd say a script must be a written representation of the spoken language, such that (a) any spoken text in that language may be written, and (b) that writing can then be read by anyone familiar with the script, to reproduce the spoken text. There may be some limitations and ambiguities (in today's scripts these mainly arise with foreign words), but mostly, I think this should be a requirement.<br /><br />Cyn: I'm not an expert in linguistics and archaeology either...<br /><br />All: well, I think the discussion has gone on long enough now! There has been much heat as well as some light, but I expect returns to diminish sharply if this continues. I'm not closing comments but probably won't reply to any more.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-36400269883922097182009-05-01T08:05:00.000+05:302009-05-01T08:05:00.000+05:30Thanks for some very interesting posts, Rahul!
I ...Thanks for some very interesting posts, Rahul!<br /><br />I must confess that I am not a linguist or archeologist, and my interest in these things is strictly non-professional.<br /><br />I don't think this issue will be resolved until someone finds a much longer text, or until the inscriptions are deciphered. I don't mean to dismiss the statistical analysis - of course there is a chance that it can offer supporting evidence. Unfortunately, I am not qualified to judge whether Rao's paper offers anything substantive in this direction. I appreciate your elaborations, at least I am now aware of some of the concerns and limitations of such types of analysis.<br /><br />While Sproat may have some valid points (again, I'm not in a position to judge), he also apparently has personal problems that color his judgement. His reaction to any disagreement seems to be along the lines "ah, you must have some hidden agenda if you disagree with me", which is quite unusual in scholarly discussions.<br /><br />Please do post news of any additional work by Rao's team, or any other developments in the study of the Indus Valley script.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16701247788575691024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-77179767161032811732009-05-01T05:55:00.000+05:302009-05-01T05:55:00.000+05:30Great blog. Let me pick up the following comments ...Great blog. Let me pick up the following comments and try to respond:<br /><br />Ranjith said…What if each symbol represents a word and not a sound? Can we say anything about it at this point ? 4/29/2009 6:47 PM<br /><br />Richard Sproat said... The problem with assuming a word-based or "ideographic" system is that, as DeFrancis and others have convincingly argued, no real ideographic writing systems exist The best one could have would be a limited system that allows you to represent a few things, but it could not have been a full writing system. If anyone has an example of an ideographic system that is indeed a full writing system, I would love to see it. 4/29/2009 8:03 PM<br /><br />Rahul Siddharthan said... Going back to your previous comment on ideographic scripts: what about Chinese? Or Japanese Kanji (which is much the same thing)? Or Egyptian hieroglyphics? These were/are perhaps not purely ideographic but are largely so; the Harappan system could have been the same. 4/30/2009 12:15 AM<br />Rahul Siddharthan said... And, by the way, your recent content-free rant, posted on Steve Farmer's page, is a disgrace to your profession. 4/30/2009 12:36 AM<br />Rahul Siddharthan said... Another example: when after all of the above discussion, someone who we know possesses basic reading comprehension asks "I think the real question for you is: why do you insist that the Indus must have been literate?", I must assume other motives and not a desire for honest discussion. Of course, I should have foreseen all this from the recent Farmer screed where Sproat is a co-author, and not tried to engage with him when he showed up here. But I did initially think he was interested in honest discussion. 4/30/2009 10:54 AM<br />Anonymous said... (1) This article appeared in science says: There is strong evidence for trade and cultural links between the Indus and cities in today’s Iran as well as Mesopotamia. 4/30/2009 9:53 PM (REF. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/320/5881/1276)<br />Rahul Siddharthan said...anonymous: thanks for the link, which I had missed. Fascinating article, as are Lawler's other articles from that issue. It is indeed extremely implausible that such a society did not know writing, but I think it is no use arguing with the Farmer crowd, who apparently believe their 2004 paper is an irrefutable proof of their notions.4/30/2009 10:57 PM<br />My comments: The arguments have been going back and forth without agreeing on definition of the key phrase, ’Writing system’. Any thing which encodes speech is a writing system. Why is there a conflation of ideas when talking about ‘ideographic systems’? If a glyph represents a word, what is such a system called? Say, tiger glyph. Can’t it be taken to represent a word, say, kola? <br />Secondly, the discussions on this blog should also focus a bit on the semantics of a language system. Many linguists have said that India of 4th to 3rd millennium BCE was a ‘linguistic area’ (that is, an area where many dialects absorbed features from one another and made them their own). If a decoding of the script provides evidence matching the glyphs (read rebus) with just one semantic category, ‘metallurgy,’ what would you call it? A writing system or not? See the arguments presented at http://sites.google.com/site/kalyan97<br />The report by scientists in Science magazine is an important contribution to language studies. It provides for an analysis of structural patterns which are the characteristic of languages. <br />A very important characteristic of languages is the semantic structure, that is, the underlying meanings of spoken words of languages. It is the 'meaning' which provides a structure even for short sequences of, say, an average of five symbols used on Indus script.<br />A major omission in the script studies so far is the arbitrary distinction made between so-called 'pictorial motifs' and 'signs'. As in Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is possible that the entire corpus of Indus script is composed of glyphs -- such as a rim of a narrow-necked jar, rimless pot, fish, svastika, antelope, elephant, tiger looking back, crocodile, ligatured animal body with three heads of one-horned heifer, short-horned bull, antelope, person seated in penance.<br />Unless all the glyphs are decoded in a logical cluster, taking into account the media used for inscriptions (such as terracotta bangles, copper plates, metallic weapons, tablets, seals), the decoding will not be complete.<br />The error made by Sproat et al is in assuming that a script has to be syllabic or alphabetic and in not evaluating the possibility of the glyphs representing words, spoken rebus (use of similar sounding words to connote substantive messages).<br />This website presents two pure tin ingots with inscriptions and proving them to be rosetta stones representing tin metal. Who else but metallurgists could have had the competence to inscribe on metallic weapons and on copper plates? This website also underscores the fact that during historical periods, early punch-marked coins from mints used the same corpus of glyphs pointing to a continuum in culture in ancient India.The conclusions drawn are that the glyphs get encoded within one semantic category -- repertoire of mints and of mine workers, pointing to the link between two great inventions: invention of writing and invention of metal alloying.<br />These conclusions have to be evaluated by any further scientific studies within the context of the continuum of language evolution as a cultural marker of an extensive civilization.<br />Vākyapadīya ("About Words and Sentences") is a work of Bhartṛhari on grammar, semantics and philosophy which looks at speech in 3 stages:.<br />1. Conceptualization by the speaker (Paśyantī "idea")<br />2. Performance of speaking (Madhyamā "medium)<br />3. Comprehension by the interpreter (Vaikharī "complete utterance"). <br />Surely the meaning of shabda (spoken word) is understood in the context of a sentence. A sentence does not have to have a string of words. When a child says, ‘cow’, the meaning is complete in the context of the child’s reference to milk. <br />Context is the key. So is sphoṭa the meaning-unit of a sentence recognized by a hearer’s anticipation.<br />When I constructed the Indian lexicon, as a comparison of over 8000 semantic clusters in over 25 ancient languages of India, I was struck by a fact that many words had multiple meanings (many were clearly homonyms). As civilization progressed reognizing new phenomena and the way people reacted to these phenomena, the repertoire of sound-strings available as words were drawn upon to agree, in a social contract, on new meanings. <br />Let me cite an example. Kol is a Tamil word meaning “pancaloha, alloy of five metals.” Kola is a Santali word meaning ‘tiger’. Kola is a Nahali word meaning ‘woman’.So, what do the inventors of a writing system in a linguistic area do? They show a tiger ligatured to a woman to connote the word kol ’five metal alloy’. As a logical extension, the word kollan is invented to connote a ‘smith.’ <br />This explains why many images are chosen in Indus script: tiger looking back, a person sitting on a branch of a tree, crocodile holding a fish in its jaws, a bovine with 3 heads of one-horned heifer, antelope, short-horned bull (each connoting a metal). A person sits in penance ‘(kamaḍha); used to connote rebus kampa ṭ ṭam ‘mint’. Ligatured glyphs is a unique method to conserve space with as many glyphs as possible to send out an unambiguous message related to metallurgical inventions. <br />Thus it is that a metallurgical invention of alloying gets matched with a writing system using ligatured glyphs. <br />My Indian lexicon has semantic cluster headers showing ímage’words and‘thought’ words, many of which are cultural social contract words.The writing system results in much more than mere mint marks; the system is used to connote the product and process while indicating the professional competence of the creator of the epigraph and the related metal artifact. <br />The test you propose for a private language is absolutely brilliant. I am sure that there are many dialects which can be candidates for the test. <br />When a symbol system gains the status of a social contract with people in an extensive area using the system, private language ceases and becomes public. A new metaphor is born.kalyan97https://www.blogger.com/profile/10697859363967489909noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-92006111830319373832009-05-01T01:02:00.000+05:302009-05-01T01:02:00.000+05:30Sri. Rahul,
Have you seen?
(a)
http://www.scienc...Sri. Rahul,<br /><br />Have you seen?<br />(a)<br /><br />http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423142316.htm<br /><br />(b)http://www.harappa.com/script/indusscript.html<br /><br />http://www.harappa.com/script/<br /><br />anbudan,<br />RamRamaswamy, S (Chicago)noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-14427127915905461662009-04-30T22:57:00.000+05:302009-04-30T22:57:00.000+05:30anonymous: thanks for the link, which I had missed...anonymous: thanks for the link, which I had missed. Fascinating article, as are Lawler's other articles from that issue. It is indeed extremely implausible that such a society did not know writing, but I think it is no use arguing with the Farmer crowd, who apparently believe their 2004 paper is an irrefutable proof of their notions.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-45735999209024657952009-04-30T21:53:00.000+05:302009-04-30T21:53:00.000+05:30Rahul,
Great blog and good discussion.
Some thou...Rahul,<br /><br />Great blog and good discussion.<br /><br />Some thoughts on Indian/Indus writing:<br /><br />(1) This article appeared in <A HREF="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/320/5881/1276" REL="nofollow">science says:</A><BR><BR><I>There is strong evidence for trade and cultural links between the<br />Indus and cities in today’s Iran as<br />well as Mesopotamia.</I><BR><BR>If there were cultural contacts and trade with others, why is it conceivable that everyone else(Sumerians, Elamites) knew writing but Indus guys alone were unaware of writing, even after having their own script-like symbols ?!<br /><br />(2)Isn't it more logical to imagine that people wrote on perishable materials (like palm leaves) than imagining that people like <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini" REL="nofollow">Paanini</A> composed all those complex grammar rules etc just based on memory ?! (not to mention the vast literature that existed then)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-23085777780668228032009-04-30T10:54:00.000+05:302009-04-30T10:54:00.000+05:30Arun - yes, it would be an interesting exercise. ...Arun - yes, it would be an interesting exercise. Road signs (suggested by km on my previous posting) would be another example -- strings in the corpus would be road signs as ordered on a given road in the driving direction. I would imagine that some correlations exist, eg between "caution" signs and posted speed limits. <br /><br />Off-hand, other than your packaging information example, I can't think of non-linguistic signs that are routinely written on small surfaces like tablets. <br /><br />Finally, in response to P above, I believe that Messrs Sproat, Liberman and co are <I>deliberately</I> and persistently missing the point: I can no longer attribute honest misunderstanding to their comments. Even if they did not read the paper and only skimmed the comments here, they cannot possibly believe that Rao et al are presenting a model. It is an example of a strawman argument: <br />instead of debating the issue, debate something else that was never being discussed anyway. <br /><br />Another example: when after all of the above discussion, someone who we know possesses basic reading comprehension asks "I think the real question for you is: why do you insist that the Indus must have been literate?", I must assume other motives and not a desire for honest discussion.<br /><br />Of course, I should have foreseen all this from the recent Farmer screed where Sproat is a co-author, and not tried to engage with him when he showed up here. But I did initially think he was interested in honest discussion.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-46198007386545007182009-04-30T07:49:00.000+05:302009-04-30T07:49:00.000+05:30I thought I was careful to say that the Indus insc...I thought I was careful to say that the Indus inscriptions are better described by a 1st order Markov model than a 0th order; etc.; apparently not.<br /><br />Obviously not the Indus inscriptions not any language not DNA can be said to be generated by a Markov model.<br /><br />I think the detractors of Rao et al. need an example, either historical, or **from a natural construction** that exhibits the same statistical features in order to shoot down the paper.<br /><br />E.g., there are <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaging" REL="nofollow">packaging symbols</A> (fragile, inflammable, liquid, recyclable, this side up, consumer electronics) etc., perhaps with variations that are not obviously the same unless you already know the meaning; and present as short sequences on myriads of cartons. With some reasonable rules on how to place these symbols, if they yield entropies like the Indus inscriptions, then the Rao et al paper doesn't advance the cause of the Indus inscriptions being a language. The construction would be ad hoc (made to demonstrate a point) but also have to be natural.Arunhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03451666670728177970noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-206733239962793452009-04-30T06:48:00.000+05:302009-04-30T06:48:00.000+05:30Arun: If the process is indeed a Markov process, t...Arun: If the process is indeed a Markov process, then the conditional entropy will reveal whether it is zeroth order or finite order. But it is possible for a zero-order process with "hidden states" to yield a conditional entropy lower than the unconditional entropy. myl gave an example, above. And indeed none of the languages or other examples being discussed (DNA, fortran) are actually generated as Markov processes: it is just a model. Sproat, Liberman et al claim that they can fit the observed language data (figure 1A) with a model that has one adjustable parameter. To complete the picture, obviously, they must also fit the data in figure S1 with the same model; as far as I can see, they don't, but I'm sure they could (with more parameters) if they tried. I just don't see what that sort of data-fitting proves. There is no fitting in the Rao et al data: it is what it is, and just happens to agree with natural languages. <br /><br />Your use of the phrase "zeroth order Markov process" is misleading. Most certainly the Indus script is not a zero-order Markov process. That is ruled out by the Rao data. The issues are: 1. there are non-Markov processes that could generate the data, 2. A Markov process does not, by itself, imply language. The question is, how likely is it that you would get language-like conditional entropy by chance?<br /><br /><br />anonymous: thanks for the long comment. I stand corrected on the Buddhist scriptures (or the common view of them, anyway). And it is of course possible that the bit about Ganesha being Vyasa's scribe was added to the Mahabharata in later centuries.<br /><br />However, I find it odd that the Vedic priests opposed writing if writing was unknown at the time. If writing was not known at all, could they have conceived it? More likely, I think, it was known but they opposed it to maintain their power. The Buddhists, and others like the Charavakas, were not beholden to the Brahminical priests and did not have a good reason to oppose writing. While Ashoka was the first famous king to convert to Buddhism, and the first to rule over large stretches of today's India, Buddhism was alive and well in India for centuries before him and after. I find it a bit of a stretch that writing was invented just about the time that a King converted to Buddhism. And what is the point of placing these pillars far and wide if nobody could read them? Literacy must have been somewhat widespread, if restricted to certain elite classes (as it was the world over).<br /><br />Also, the Vedas were transmitted very precisely because of the careful system of Vedic chanting (which even preserved linguistic differences between the earlier and later Vedas). Other Hindu texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata were not so carefully transmitted and have probably evolved substantially over the centuries. I don't think the Buddhists are known to have had a comparable system of chanting -- so if it was a purely oral tradition that maintained the Buddha's teachings until Ashoka's times or the Sri Lankan council, we must assume that some distortions occurred in the intervening centuries.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-21640910895745300032009-04-30T05:04:00.000+05:302009-04-30T05:04:00.000+05:30More heat than light, as Mark Liberman anticipated...More heat than light, as Mark Liberman anticipated! I have nothing to add to what I've already said but I was intrigued by the brief discussion pertaining to writing in India, so I did some search to find more. Please feel free to delete this comment, Rahul.<br /><br />Other than the Indus valley script, the earliest evidence for writing in India is, as you said, exactly around Ashoka's time. Was there writing before that? One possibility, as you suggest, is that there was but nothing from pre-Ashokan (but post-Indus valley) times has survived. Alternatively, some have suggested that writing was invented just around Ashoka's time. I'll come back to this point but let first take up the <I>Sutta Nipata</I> which you suggest was written immediately after the Buddha's death. That appears not to be true.<br /><br />I quote from <I>The Sutta Nipata</I>, translated by H. Saddhatissa, 1985: "The canonical texts of the Theravadin school of Buddhism,...collectively known as the Pali Canon are divided into the three main sections...All these texts were transmitted orally and only committed to ola leaf manuscripts in modern Sri Lanka in the first century B.C." An earlier book by Lord Chalmers says "Indeed, it cannot be assumed that in its present form, any given `book' of the [Pali] Canon dates back to before Ashoka's Council held at Patna in (perhaps) 240 B.C." (Both books can be previewed via Google Books; I am quoting from the Introduction in both cases.)<br /><br />Back to writing in India. I think someone (Farmer? Witzel?) has suggested that the Vedic priests opposed writing, fearing perhaps the loss of their pre-eminence. Note that even after writing emerged, the Vedas themselves were not written until very modern times! Now resistance from entrenched groups to the introduction of a new technology is not unknown: Jared Diamond discusses this point in his monumental <I>Guns, Germs and Steel.</I> A notable and strange one is Japan which took to guns from the Portuguese in 1543, quickly improved the technology and then proceeded to ban it altogether. The ban ended only after Commodore Perry ended that country's self-imposed isolation in 1853! The reason for the ban was that the samurais (the traditional warrior class) feared that the guns could be operated by anyone (which it was) and hence preferred the sword! See the account by Jared Diamond here:<br /><br />http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p5.html<br /><br /><br />Anyway, if one believes in the possibility of the Vedic priests opposing writing, then it is not unbelievable [no proof, mind you] that it was not until Ashoka, the first significant Buddhist king, one who [after his conversion] was not beholden to Vedic priests and who had his own reasons for wanting writing, that India as such adopted writing with the Brahmi script. The Nagari script based on Brahmi in which Sanskrit and other North Indian languages are written came later. <br /><br />(The following article of Witzel may have details on the resistance to writing in India: <I>Brahmanical Reactions to Foreign Influences and to Social and Religious Change.</I> In: Olivelle, P. (ed.) Between the Empires. Society in India between 300 BCE and 400 CE. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006: 457-499.)<br /><br /><br />Lastly, let me note that the time of the Indus Valley civilization is around the time when writing first appeared anywhere in the world. (I am depending on Jared Diamond here.) There are only four or five places where writing emerged independently, -- so not surprisingly, there isn't much to compare the Indus Valley Civilization with. However -- you will not like this -- Farmer et al do discuss Elam and contrast the unavailability of long texts in the Indus valley from a large corpus with Elam where texts of substantial length are available for the (undeciphered) Linear Elamite from a much smaller corpus. (See page 22 of their 2004 manuscript.) <br /><br />It's been nice participating but I think I should stop here. Thanks for the discussion.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-30103258983613847492009-04-30T03:02:00.000+05:302009-04-30T03:02:00.000+05:30Rahul:
Question - from myl's and Richard Sproat's...Rahul:<br /><br />Question - from myl's and Richard Sproat's simulations, it would appear that bigram conditional entropy is not sufficient to distinguish between a 0th order and a 1st order Markov process. Is this true in general? <br /><br />Or to ask a related question, have Rao et. al., established clearly that a first order Markov process models the Indus inscriptions better than any zeroth order Markov process? <br /><br />Or is it that, assuming a first order Markov process for the Indus inscriptions, it falls right in the middle of the first order Markov processes (as measured by conditional entropy) that model linguistic systems?<br /><br />Presumably there is a large but finite space of historical human-generated non-linguistic systems - if conditional entropy can be computed for each of them, and none of them falls into the linguistic class, then we have a strong indication (but never proof) that the Indus inscriptions are linguistic.<br /><br />Thanks in advance for your answers.Arunhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03451666670728177970noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-56399663777271968822009-04-30T02:40:00.000+05:302009-04-30T02:40:00.000+05:30So if you want a model that explains all of these ...<I>So if you want a model that explains all of these things, you are not going to find it in their paper.</I><BR><BR>I am amazed reading this comment from Sproat! After all this, he seems to think that what Rao et al published is a model !!Pnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-44868428700520333522009-04-30T00:36:00.000+05:302009-04-30T00:36:00.000+05:30Richard,
Ok good. So it's not a match with anythi...Richard,<br /><br /><I>Ok good. So it's not a match with anything. So why are we even discussing it?</I>You are either trying to score cheap debating points here, or you have not actually read the Rao et al manuscript, despite its brevity. <br /><br />Nobody is making categorical assertions except you. It is a question of evidence and how that evidence affects your posterior beliefs, given your prior beliefs. If your prior beliefs have a confidence of 100%, nothing will change that.<br /><br />Your 2004 paper contains no proofs of any kind either, but you don't have the modesty to admit it. Just compare the two titles -- your "Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis" versus their "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script". You assert an alleged truth confidently, they claim some statistical findings. But your statistics are laughably inadequate and the rest of your paper is so much handwaving. Now, I wonder why your university ignored it.<br /><br />Sorry if that sounds personal, but I didn't start it, and I have no personal axe to grind -- I do have some issues with the Rao et al paper and I agree with some of the things you say. But I cannot take anyone seriously who dismisses all critics as nationalists of one kind or another, while refusing to read their arguments and making absurd distortions of their statements. <br /><br />And, by the way, your recent content-free rant, posted on Steve Farmer's page, is a disgrace to your profession.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-78295976067317858672009-04-30T00:24:00.000+05:302009-04-30T00:24:00.000+05:30I guess the following summarizes the issue rather ...I guess the following summarizes the issue rather well: <EM>Richard, I really do not understand what you are saying. The Rao et al data is not a match with anything. It is what it is.</EM>Ok good. So it's not a match with anything. So why are we even discussing it?<br /><br />On Brahui. Yeah everyone knows that. Try convincing most Indologists that that is due to anything other than a recent migration. Hans Hock has a lot to say on this topic, for example.<br /><br />I'm not an archaeologist, but I would have thought inkpots would be easy to identify: wouldn't they contain traces of ink?<br /><br />China was later actually. But the earliest texts --- the Oracle Bones --- are much longer than anything Indus. So are the earliest Mesoamerican inscriptions --- much much later in their case, but then that was clearly developed independently anyway.<br /><br />On your other points: yeah I guess one can <EM>imagine</EM> anything. It's just a question of the sum total of things that one has to imagine.<br /><br />I think the real question for you is: why do you insist that the Indus must have been literate? I.e. why, fundamentally, do you care? Why is the conclusion that it might not have been a worry to you?<br /><br />Okay this is my last post here. Obviously the discussions are getting<br />us nowhere. It is pretty clear what would need to be done at a minimum<br />to do the work that Rao et al did, in a more rigorous and (dare I say)<br />scientific fashion.<br /><br />First we would need a <EM>much</EM> wider range of languages and<br />different types of writing systems.<br /><br />Second we would need some serious corpora (not made up examples) of<br />non-linguistic systems. Unfortunately creating those is work, and<br />since not too many (if any) really exist, we are probably looking at a<br />few years' wait before the experiments could be done. I will have no<br />more to say about that here, but if anyone is seriously interested in<br />collaborating on something like that you can email me (I am easily<br />findable on the web), and we can discuss it.<br /><br />Then, finally, we would need to come up with a serious battery of<br />statistical tests, being very careful to come up with plausible models<br />of the priors, per Fernando Pereira's points.<br /><br />Then, and only then, <EM>might</EM> we be able to make a claim about<br />what the Indus system looks like.<br /><br />But even then this will probably fail to make much difference. People<br />who want to believe this was a script for a language will continue to<br />try to decipher it, making all sorts of theories about what the<br />language (or languages) was, and what type of writing system it<br />was. There is no shortage of would-be Ventris's out there, as I can<br />attest from the other two controversies --- the Phaistos disk, and<br />rongorongo --- that I have been involved in. <br /><br />(With the Phaistos disk, the fundamental observation that many people<br />have made that the text is <EM>too short</EM> to allow for a<br />verifiable decipherment, completely fails to stop people from trying<br />and being tickled pink when they "succeed". With rongorongo, many<br />people seem to have been impressed by Pozdniakov's demonstration that<br />a frequency plot of his decomposed glyphs matches, by some stretch of<br />the imagination, the distribution of syllables in Rapanui. Of course,<br />all he's done is rediscover that many symbol systems show a roughly<br />Zipfian distribution, meaning that a Zipfian distribution tells us<br />nothing at all.)<br /><br />Archaeologists will continue to dig up new seals or other<br />inscriptions. If the pro-script camp gets lucky, they'll eventually<br />find a long text, or a bilingual. Occasionally computer scientists<br />will rediscover the wheel --- it seems to have been largely forgotten<br />in this discussion that the people at Helsinki did all kinds of<br />Harrisian analysis on the corpus and discovered structure back in the<br />1960's; will be able to hoodwink <EM>Science</EM> into publishing<br />(apparently quite easily done); and especially if they work at a<br />university that likes to promote its researchers' work (despite the<br />revolutionary nature of the work, the University of Illinois, where I<br />was at the time, chose to ignore our 2004 publication), get their<br />Warholian 15 minutes of fame. Since the press rarely publishes<br /><EM>nostra culpa</EM> articles, the fame may even last 15 minutes<br />before it turns to embarrassment (by which time people will have moved<br />on to something else anyway). Hindu extremists will continue to try<br />to find horses in an apparently horse-free society, and publish<br />inflammatory remarks about people who would dare suggest that their<br />ancestors were illiterate. (<EM>Their</EM> ancestors? But we don't<br />even know who the Indus people were...)<br /><br />In other words, this will change practically nothing.<br /><br />In a way, I would be happy if someone <EM>did</EM> dig up a bilingual<br />--- say a Sumerian-Indus dictionary nicely arranged on 100 clay<br />tablets. Of course it would mean we were wrong. That's cool: I do not<br />mind being wrong. What really irks me is not being wrong, but being<br />told I'm wrong because of a largely bogus result that shows nothing at<br />all, especially when a lot of the people (e.g. in the scientific<br />press) have not thought at all about the issue, and are merely<br />impressed by what looks like a convincing plot.Richard Sproatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-28887520941245306362009-04-30T00:15:00.000+05:302009-04-30T00:15:00.000+05:30Richard, I really do not understand what you are s...Richard, I really do not understand what you are saying. The Rao et al data is not a match with anything. It is what it is.<br /><br />The question is, having fine-tuned your one-parameter model to fit the Indus curve in figure 1A, will the same data also fit the unconditional entropy Indus curve in figure S1? My guess is it will not, but of course if you add more parameters, you can get it to fit.<br /><br />If you then look at the individual symbol frequencies of your model, are they similar to the actual Indus frequencies? Probably not, but you can probably arrive at a model with the same frequencies and the same unconditional and conditional entropies, at the expense of throwing in some more parameters. <br /><br />Ptolemy's epicycles did explain planetary motion pretty well, too.<br /><br />Going back to your previous comment on ideographic scripts: what about Chinese? Or Japanese Kanji (which is much the same thing)? Or Egyptian hieroglyphics? These were/are perhaps not purely ideographic but are largely so; the Harappan system could have been the same.<br /><br />Your other comments on perishable documents probably either deserve a post of their own in response, or deserve to be dismissed as a lot of unsubstantiated handwaving. I do not know what you mean by "adequately addressed" in your 2004 paper. In this space let me just make the following comments/questions:<br /><br />1. I don't know why you need pens, inkpots, styluses -- why not quills? They were quite common in the west, until recently. If styluses, why not wooden or other perishable materials? Why not vegetable-based dyes, which are common in India even today? Maybe the inkpots were the pottery that has been found -- how would you specifically identify a Harappan inkpot?<br /><br />2. Maybe they did write on leaves or animalskin, and didn't invent paper (Indian civilisations didn't come across paper for centuries, and used palm leaves). Palm leaves survive for centuries but probably not for 3.5 to 4.5 millennia. Why is that hard to imagine? <br /><br />3. Perhaps they did not build enormous edifices with ornate inscriptions, or if they did, nothing has survived the centuries, except the tablets and a few other things. Why is that hard to imagine?<br /><br />4. I don't see why the hotness and alleged dryness of Harappa should help your argument. Organic materials decompose <I>faster</I> in heat, not slower. And while Harappa may be dry today, it is hardly a desert; and it certainly wasn't one in earlier times -- it did sustain a flourishing civilisation.<br /><br />5. The number of civilisations as old as the Indus Valley one that have left behind written materials is quite small: I know only of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Elam, and perhaps China. Of these, I don't think long texts survive from Elam or the contemporaneous period in China -- correct me if I am wrong. Even the Egyptian papyruses that you cite are younger than the Indus Valley civilisation.<br /><br />6. The Ashoka pillars are an accident of Ashoka's personal history -- his father and grandfather did not erect pillars, or if they did, none have survived. Do you think they were illiterate and Ashoka invented writing? If Ashoka's life had transpired differently and he did not erect those pillars, perhaps you would think that Indians did not write for a few centuries longer. Several examples of writing appear in Hindu mythology (eg, Ganesha writing with his broken tusk). Many of the Buddhist Sutras, in particular the Sutta Nipata, are believed to have been written soon after the Buddha's death, by his direct disciples. The fact that original manuscripts do not survive means nothing. We don't know what sort of script was used, but the idea that these rather advanced communities did not know how to write defies belief. To apply your own criteria here, can you think of any other examples of communities with sophisticated governance, rich literature and advanced philosophies, who were illiterate?<br /><br />7. You are dismissive of the Indus-Dravidian hypothesis because of the geographical distance between the Indus Valley sites and present-day Tamil Nadu, as well as the temporal distance between the Indus civilisation and the earliest recorded Tamil. But there is a Dravidian-origin language, Brahui, still spoken in parts of Pakistan and some neighbouring areas. Some scholars believe that the Elam language, roughly contemporaneous with the Harappans, was also of the Dravidian family. Finally, the known continuous history of Tamil is much longer than the gap that you object to between the Indus valley and Old Tamil. It does not seem such a stretch to think the Indus language may have been a Dravidian language.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-26830921229900142822009-04-29T22:37:00.000+05:302009-04-29T22:37:00.000+05:30Really ? Without assuming that they are writing, a...<EM>Really ? Without assuming that they are writing, are there many models that will explain all three of the following<br /><br />(1) Simple entropy data of Indus symbols (Fig S1 of Rao et al)</EM>Well my simple model of course doesn't fit the unigram one very well --- entropies are too low. But of course as they themselves note, <B>none</B> of the linguistic systems fit the Indus well in S1. The best fit is to the non-linguistic of Type 2.<br /><br /><EM>(2) Conditional entropy of Indus symbols (Fig 1 of Rao et al)<br /></EM><EM>(3) Various distributions of Indus symbols (unigram distribution, for example)<br /><br /><br />I am interested to know which model fits all of the above. My guess is that without assuming some correlations, similar to that of real-world languages, one may not be able to get all of the above.<br /></EM>Well I think the question is already answered. If you want a match in both simple and conditional entropy, you do not find it with Rao et al.'s data either. For the simple, it looks like a "non-linguistic" (strawman) system. For the conditional it looks like maybe Tamil, maybe Sumerian. <br /><br />So if you want a model that explains all of these things, you are not going to find it in their paper.<br /><br />In any case, at some level the answer is obvious: the best model is the model that generated the corpus in the first place. Problem is, we don't know what that is. And we are not going to answer it by producing limited statistical tests on an even more limited subset of natural languages, and a highly imperfect and misleading understanding of non-linguistic symbol systems.<br /><br />Look, go ahead and believe it if you want to. Of course there is the issue of weight of evidence raised by another "anonymous": we had a bunch of arguments in the original Farmer, Sproat & Witzel paper, and most of them had nothing to do with corpus statistics. Rao et al's paper addresses none of those. To my mind, accepting their conclusion, especially given how it was arrived at, as concluding anything is like convicting someone of a crime, when all the available evidence points to someone else, but the person you happen to want to convict is approximately the right height.Richard Sproatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-42191050954575318682009-04-29T22:04:00.000+05:302009-04-29T22:04:00.000+05:30The main point is that there are many models that ...<I>The main point is that there are many models that might explain the data without assuming they are writing.</I><BR><BR>Really ? Without assuming that they are writing, are there many models that will explain all three of the following <br /><br />(1) Simple entropy data of Indus symbols (Fig S1 of Rao et al)<br /><br />(2) Conditional entropy of Indus symbols (Fig 1 of Rao et al)<br /><br />(3) Various distributions of Indus symbols (unigram distribution, for example)<br /><br />I am interested to know which model fits all of the above. My guess is that without assuming some correlations, similar to that of real-world languages, one may not be able to get all of the above.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-46718088816187183402009-04-29T20:10:00.000+05:302009-04-29T20:10:00.000+05:30or even better: system's exist -> systems e...or even better: system's exist -> systems exist.<br />yikes, careless editing.Richard Sproatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-33618224347946033922009-04-29T20:08:00.000+05:302009-04-29T20:08:00.000+05:30Oops again: The problem with assuming a word-based...Oops again: <EM>The problem with assuming a word-based or "ideographic" system is that, as DeFrancis and others have convincingly argued, no real ideographic writing system</EM> should of course have read<br /><EM>The problem with assuming a word-based or "ideographic" system is that, as DeFrancis and others have convincingly argued, no real ideographic writing system's exist </EM>Richard Sproatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-65551178094735113382009-04-29T20:03:00.000+05:302009-04-29T20:03:00.000+05:30Some comments on recent questions comments:
Do In...Some comments on recent questions comments:<br /><br /><EM>Do Indus symbols have a Zipfian unigram distribution, with the parameter value close to what you got after tweaking ? (in other words, does your tweaked distribution match with the Indus symbol unigram distribution ?)</EM> I don't know since I don't have access to precisely the corpus that Rao et al used. I do have some earlier (unigram) counts from Mahadevan's work, but I am not sure this is the same corpus. But in any event I would assume the answer is "no". But so what? I am not saying my model <EM>is</EM> what is going on for the Indus script, just that it's one of many models that can produce the same results as what Rao et al show. The main point, which was also Pereira's main point, is that there are many models that might explain the data without assuming they are writing.<br /><br /><EM>Can you show a few examples of real world non-linguistic symbols, which has a conditional entropy that matches with that of languages/Indus symbols ?</EM> Not yet, but then there are very few electronic corpora of such symbol systems available. So that argues that I could not use statistical methods to demonstrate that the Indus corpus is non-linguistic. But for the same reason, I can't show the opposite. As I suggested to Rao, in the absence of any credible attempt to "decipher" the Indus symbols, it would be useful in any case to spend our efforts understanding non-linguistic symbol systems better.<br /><br />The problem with assuming a word-based or "ideographic" system is that, as DeFrancis and others have convincingly argued, no real ideographic writing system. The best one could have would be a limited system that allows you to represent a few things, but it could not have been a full writing system. If anyone has an example of an ideographic system that is indeed a full writing system, I would love to see it.<br /><br />I believe the issue of perishable materials was adequately addressed in Farmer et al, so I am not sure why it is being raised again here. The lack of any credible markers of literacy (pens, ink pots, styluses) or the fact that there were no civilizations that had long texts on perishable materials that did not also have long texts on non-perishable materials: those points seem hard to argue with. Yeah I suppose you could conceive of a civilization that had a full writing system, wrote long tracts of prose on sheepskin, confined their writing on more durable materials to short pithy phrases, and somehow arranged it so that not only did the perishable materials perish, but everything that was used to create them. I suppose anything is possible: but I think one tries to avoid conclusions that make something seem odder than it already does.<br /><br />Also, I find the perishable materials hypothesis dubious on other grounds: even if something is perishable, it does not mean that <EM>every</EM> example must perish. We have Egyptian papyruses from the 3rd millenium BC. Is it really credible that <EM>nothing</EM> would have survived for the Indus, if it existed? It's certainly hot enough and dry enough there, as I can attest from having been at Harappa in July 2005.<br /><br />I'm not sure why you think the number of ancient civilizations that left around written material is small. Indeed, even those that were clearly literate but did not leave much around, tended nonetheless to leave much longer inscriptions than the Indus people did, which was one of the points that we made in our original paper.<br /><br />A plausible explanation for why the Ashokan inscriptions are the first is that that was when India first learned to write. There are no texts from the Vedic period because they didn't have literacy in the Vedic period. I realize I'm treading on dangerous ground here, not because I believe what I am saying is false, but because the statement is taken as inflammatory in some circles. So be it.Richard Sproatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-60686112346782998342009-04-29T18:55:00.000+05:302009-04-29T18:55:00.000+05:30Ranjith - if the Indus script does encode a langua...Ranjith - if the Indus script does encode a language, very likely it is pictographic/ideographic (each symbol represents a word or idea, not a sound). Rao et al calculate the conditional entropy for English using both word-units and letter-units. The argument that there are no surviving long texts from Indus times seems specious to me for three reasons: first, as many have pointed out, longer texts may have been on more perishable media that have not survived; second, the number of other civilisations of that antiquity who have left behind written corpuses is small, so there is nothing much to compare with; third, there are no surviving long written texts from India even from the Vedic and later periods: Ashoka's are among the earliest surviving inscriptions.Rahul Siddharthanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04809667965184094636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3112258799568696095.post-26819078388372206282009-04-29T18:47:00.000+05:302009-04-29T18:47:00.000+05:30how does one evaluate the significance of the evid...<I>how does one evaluate the significance of the evidence cited by Farmer et al that while most other literate societies have left behind texts of substantial lengths, the largest one in the Indus script is 17 characters long with a mean of 4.6 or so.</I><BR>In this context, I have a naive query.<br /><br />Have people considered the possibility that Indus symbols could be some kind of a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand" REL="nofollow"><B>shorthand</B></A> writing method ? What if each symbol represents a word and not a sound? Can we say anything about it at this point ?<br /><br />If one takes some English prose written in shorthand notation and calculates its conditional entropy, i wonder how it will differ from the existing result for English!<br /><br />ps: i must admit that i do not know anything about the shorthand notation!Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14177466323485946431noreply@blogger.com