2009/04/24 by Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank Vahia +3 · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Language and cultural evolution
paper · doi:10.1126/science.1170391
openalex publication_date 2009/04/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
The script of the ancient Indus civilization remains undeciphered. The hypothesis that the script encodes language has recently been questioned. Here, we present evidence for the linguistic hypothesis by showing that the script's conditional entropy is closer to those of natural languages than various types of nonlinguistic systems.