The academic enmity in this field, between published authors, is huge and entertaining. These quotes from the article:<p><i>Wells’ beef with Witzel goes all the way back to his PhD dissertation on the Indus script, which Witzel tried to block, according to Wells. Later, while escorting Witzel through India, Wells would show him a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Ten reasons you don’t know what you’re talking about” while in the back of a cab.</i><p>and<p><i>“You would be better off getting medical advice from your garbage man than you would getting ideas about the Indus script from listening to Steve Farmer,”</i>
Indus Script is not currently in Unicode. There was a proposal in 1999 with about 250 code points. <a href="http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n1959.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n1959.pdf</a>
The problem, as TFA points out, is that 1) the inscriptions are short, on average 5 symbols, 2) the underlying language and even the language family is unknown.<p>Most (all?) decipherments have relied on having an idea of the language at least. What we have here are lots of seals with a bit of text, not paragraphs with real structure to analyze, maybe not even sentences.<p>Since they are seals, maybe they are mostly labels identifying the owner, or maybe some transactional label. In which case you will be hard pressed to extract a language from them. You probably will need longer examples to make progress.
If it does encode different languages in different places, like cuneiform, it might be worthwhile focusing on inscriptions found on the fringes, like in Iraq. Maybe some of them are actually Sumerian inscriptions or something like that.
I find it surprising that only in the past few years someone started to use statistical analysis (Markov, bigrams, trigrams) on this script. These are techniques that have been in use by cryptanalists for decades. Sounds like something very basic that you would do in the initial efforts to analyze any ancient script.
The headline reminds me of this<p><a href="http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html" rel="nofollow">http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html</a>
As a professional linguist, I think that Farmer et al. are probably right and it's almost surely not a "writing system" at all. (This is a term of art with a very specific sense.)
So a Google search tells me this is supposed to be the unicorn <a href="http://i.imgur.com/cdbIpEd.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/cdbIpEd.jpg</a><p>Could it simply be some sort of rope/wire wrapped around the animals head with some wooden/metal rod used for steering? There seems to be a saddle too?
I was hoping this would be about the Voynich manuscript<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript</a>