Ms. Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, software developer by profession, and independent researcher by passion, gave an online invited talk on Indus Inscriptions Were Logographic, Don’t Spell Them Out: Says Semantic Co-occurrence Restriction Patterns on 11 September. The talk was organised by the Cultural Wing of the Student Life Committee (SLC).
Indus valley inscriptions are one of the most enigmatic aspects of the most expansive Bronze Age civilization of the world (c. 2600 BC to 1900 BC). This presentation was on the findings of the article Interrogating Indus inscriptions to unravel their mechanisms of meaning conveyance, and demonstrated that majority of the Indus valley inscription were written using word-signs or logograms, and thus problematizes most of the existing claimed decipherments that have tried to read these inscriptions through spellings or using rebus principle. This presentation explored the co-occurrence restriction patterns in the inscriptions and established that such patterns can arise only in semantic co-occurrence restrictions, not phonological co-occurrence restrictions, proving that Indus signs were word-signs, not phonemes. This study has done a through contextualization of the Inscribed seals, seal-impressions, tablets, and pottery shards of Indus valley civilization to show that they were formalized data carriers, like our modern-day tax tokens, trade licenses, and fiscal stamps, and had used both linguistic and document specific syntaxes. It further proves that these brief inscriptions had encoded messages that were used mainly in commercial contexts where standardization and metrology played important roles. This presentation demonstrated how several Indus signs can be clustered into certain functional classes, and how the inscriptions had used linguistic features such as subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, morphological reduplication, etc. in their process of meaning conveyance. This study forms the structural basis of the prospective semantic analyses of Indus valley inscriptions, including the author’s next study that has attempted partial decipherments of a selected set of inscriptions. A theoretical payoff from this presentation was demonstration of the extent to which fluid movements between different branches of science can aid in the understanding of inscriptions that have obstinately defied and resisted traditional decipherment methods for 150 years since their discovery.
Ms. Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay is a software developer by profession, and independent researcher by passion, presently she is conducting self-financed research on the Indus script, and the language(s) used in the ancient Indus valley civilization.
Her current Indus script researches are presently categorized into three main categories:
- structural analysis of the Indus valley inscriptions
- semantic analysis of the Indus inscriptions
- reconstructing the languages used in the Indus valley civilization, (studied independently from the script).