Travis H. wrote:
On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 03:46:41PM -0800, Allen wrote:
[...]
> What about other languages? Does anyone know the
relative entropy of
> other alphabetic languages? What about the entropy of
ideographic
> languages? Pictographic? Hieroglyphic?
IIRC, it turned out that Egyptian heiroglyphs were actually
syllabic,
like Mesopotamian, so no fun there. Mayan, on the other
hand, remains
an enigma. I read not long ago that they also had a way of
recording
stories on bundles of knotted string, like the end of a
mop.
The string-encoding system was Incan, not Mayan. They're
called
'quipus', and
while they contain a lot of numeric data, its highly debated
whether
they were
a generalized writing system (most experts seem to doubt
it).
The Maya used an logosyllabic writing system which has been
deciphered,
most of the progress having been made in the last 25 years
or so.
Peter Trei
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