Why it is in news?

• Two scientists working at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, (IMSc) have figured out a way to computationally estimate whether a language is written from left to right or otherwise.
• Most interestingly, they have studied the Indus script and calculated that it must flow from right to left.

Harappan script

• We know intuitively that in a language, some words are used more often than others.
• Similarly, some letters of the alphabet occur more at the start of words and others are more common at the end of words.
• The variation faced by different letters may be measured using two independent statistical indices — the Gini index and Shannon’s entropy.
• Scientist  have established that there is a difference between these measures when calculated for the first letter and the last letter.
• This difference between start and end of a word makes it possible for them to identify whether the word is written from left to right or the other way around.
• In most of 24 languages studied, including Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Sumerian, the duo was able to match their results and predict using their computation alone whether the words in that language were written left to right or otherwise.
• In the hitherto undeciphered Indus script also, they predict that the words are written from right to left.

Source

The Hindu