Indus signs encoding (RE: The Phaistos Disc)

From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2006 - 09:36:11 CST

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    Richard W. wrote in Unicode list:
    >As for boustrophedon, Unicode support is very poor. You would also have to
    >do your own line-breaking.

    By the way, the script of Indus inscriptions - many of
    them are boustrophedon. This we know because the short
    inscriptions on some seals are in one line,
    on short seals they become boustrophedon.

    We need Unicode encoding for Indus inscriptions
    for researching more into the ancient, bronze-age script.
    The corpus is stable - some 5000+ seals found
    in 100 years over the world's largest bronze-age civilization
    in some 10000 square miles. People claim different
    langauges are encoded (eg., S. R. Rao, B. B. Lal
    (both former Director Generals of Archaeological Survey
    of India), but Indologists (who read Indic texts and scripts)
    say it's Dravidian (see A. Parpola, Cambridge univ. book,
    I. Mahadevan's concordance of Indus inscriptions, etc.,)

    Some say Munda languages, but possibly not because
    those languages originated in South East Asia, (Cambodia?).
    But Indus civilization spreads from west (Afghanistan, w. Pakistan, ...)
    to East over centuries.

    But whatever the language family is, the Indus seal inscriptions
    need encoding.

    N. Ganesan



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