Entropy of other languages

[Trei, Peter]

Travis H. wrote:

On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 03:46:41PM -0800, Allen wrote:
[...]

> What about other languages? Does anyone know the relative entropy of 
> other alphabetic languages? What about the entropy of ideographic 
> languages? Pictographic? Hieroglyphic?

IIRC, it turned out that Egyptian heiroglyphs were actually syllabic,
like Mesopotamian, so no fun there.  Mayan, on the other hand, remains
an enigma.  I read not long ago that they also had a way of recording
stories on bundles of knotted string, like the end of a mop.

The string-encoding system was Incan, not Mayan. They're called
'quipus', and 
while they contain a lot of numeric data, its highly debated whether
they were 
a generalized writing system (most experts seem to doubt it).

The Maya used an logosyllabic writing system which has been deciphered,
most of the progress having been made in the last 25 years or so.

Peter Trei


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