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…
The mechanism is usually the same: a word is used loosely, the loose sense becomes common, and the precise one falls away. Here are fifteen that travelled unusually far.
1.…
Scripts are usually classified by what a single character represents: a sound, a syllable, a consonant, or a whole word. Almost every design choice below follows from that decision. Here…
The pattern is consistent: name the colour after the thing, then keep the name long after nobody uses the thing. Here are fifteen.
1. Maroon
From the French for chestnut,…