Source: Wikipedia
Decipherment requires a bilingual text — the same content in a script you can read and one you cannot — and the number of such texts is very small,…
There is a persistent belief that some people speak with an accent and others speak normally.
It is not true in any technical sense, and the belief itself is worth…
Source: Wikipedia
Writing is rarer than it looks.
Almost every script in use today descends from a small number of original inventions, spreading and adapting rather than being independently devised. Real…
Source: Wikipedia
Decipherment is a statistical exercise before it is anything else.
Every script that has been successfully read was cracked because there was enough of it. Enough text for repeated…
Ask most people whether counting is natural and they will say obviously yes. Every culture counts. Children learn numbers early. It feels less like a skill than a faculty.
The…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of problem that looks impossible from the outside and turns out to be merely extremely difficult, and decipherment sits squarely in it.
When Egyptian hieroglyphs…