Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script
Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav,Mayank N. Vahia,Hrishikesh Joglekar,R. Adhikari, Iravatham Mahadevan
Friday, September 18, 2009
Affinity of Indus texts with Dravidian language Tamil
There has been considerable debate regarding whether the Indus texts have affinity with the Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), Indo-European languages (such as Sanskrit), or some other language family. A frequently cited argument in favor of the Dravidian hypothesis is that the Indus texts appear to be agglutinative in their morphological structure: sign sequences often have the same initial signs but different final signs (ranging from 1 to 3 signs).Such modification of morphemes by a system of suffixes is found in Dravidian languages but is rare in Indo-European languages (such as Sanskrit) which tend to be inflectional (changing the final sound of a word rather than adding suffixes). Our result that the conditional entropy(measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message) of the Indus texts is closest to Old Tamil, a Dravidian language, among the datasets we considered is suggestive in this regard. However, this result is also tied to our use of an alpha-syllabic script to represent the Sangam era Tamil texts.
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Tamil language is a Dravidian language and mother of other ancient languages.Later the way and style of Tamil Language has changed , then Shaiva and Vaishnava philosophies, and literature influenced by Sanskrit. Some of these were the esteemed Bharatham in Tamil by Tamil poet Villiputthurar, Thiruppuhazh in Tamil (hymns) by Tamil poet Arunagirinathar. Ancient Indian literature has great values, the Vedas and Sangam literature of Tamil gives the moral of life. Tamil language is easy to learn and teach tamil letters.
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