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Originally published in Science Express on 23 April 2009
Science 29 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5931, p. 1165
DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391
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Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script

Rajesh P. N. Rao,1,* Nisha Yadav,2,3 Mayank N. Vahia,2,3 Hrishikesh Joglekar,4 R. Adhikari,5 Iravatham Mahadevan6

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.

1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
2 Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 400005, India.
3 Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, Mumbai 400098, India.
4 14, Dhus Wadi, Laxminiketan, Thakurdwar, Mumbai 400002, India.
5 The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai 600113, India.
6 Indus Research Centre, Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai 600113, India.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rao{at}cs.washington.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
A Markov model of the Indus script.
R. P. N. Rao, N. Yadav, M. N. Vahia, H. Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and I. Mahadevan (2009)
PNAS 106, 13685-13690
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