LING 270

Language, Technology & Society

Homework for Unit 3

Handed out: Monday, February 11

Due, in class, Monday February 18, 2007

.

1. (12 points) The first thing that needs to be determined in any attempted decipherment is whether something is a writing system or not: not every set of symbols marked on a surface is an instance of writing.

Consider the following artifact:

Answer the following questions:

a. How many distinct symbols do there seem to be? What are they?

b. Assuming the vertical bar is a word separator (it may not be of course) how many distinct words are there? Do they repeat? Show a list of the words with their counts. (Note that you might want to pay attention to where the word boundary symbols fall relative to the end of the line: you should not necessarily assume that a line break coincides with a word break.)

c. What is the total number of words in the text? (NB: that's not the same as the number of distinct words.)

d. Take a sample of English text from any source (newspapers, your email, one of your textbooks, this homework) of about the same total number of words: how many distinct words are there? Given the result you get for English, does the number of distinct words on the artifact given this amount of text seem about right?

e. Now how about the number of symbols? In your English text, how many distinct letters are used? Suppose English only used consonants -- remove all the vowels from your text sample -- then how many distinct letters are used?

f. Given the size of the symbol set for this artifact, what can you say about the likely type of writing system, if it is a writing system?

g. And finally: given your analysis, do you think this is a writing system? Argue for your position: i.e. don't just say "yes I think it is" or "no I think it isn't". I want to understand your reasoning. You might think about it as follows: what assumptions would you need to make about either the underlying language, or the type of writing system or the type of text that is being communicated, in order for this to be a plausible instance of writing?

2. (6 points) In the following example, assume that words are separated by vertical bars, but do not assume that linebreaks correspond to word breaks. What is the probable direction of the script. Why?

OUSR|SR|VI

H|ANJFVEA|

Q|V|RCZROS

JWM|IHSOCO

UAP|V|RCZR

M|IHSOCOSO

WJUAP|SR|V

JFSR|WPAG|

NA|MWJUAP|

|CHW|APAUK

LCRO|RCZRO

|AIH|AOCOS

NAOOAP|QHP

AUOH|AFHR|

P|NAOOAP|S

UJNV|AUO|I

Now how about the following example. Answer the same questions: what is the possible reading direction and why?

B|APB|AP|H

NZ|AP|H|AP

P|H|APB|ZP

APB|ZPNZ|A

KM|H|AP|H|

|JWHU|ZKT|

H|APB|ZPNZ

OKI|KM|AP|

JJCS|JWHU|

MTP|BSSJ|T

Finally: I will give 5 extra credit points if you can decipher these. Each is in English and each is encoded in a substitution cipher -- a simple one-for-one letter substitution. However they are encoded in different ciphers.