On the Non-Specificity of Statistical Measures Used in Script Decipherment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02999v1
• Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:33:02 GMT
• Title: On the Non-Specificity of Statistical Measures Used in Script Decipherment
• Abstract summary: SIGIL is a purpose-built generative emblem system whose 3,000-text core corpus carries explicit compositional meanings.<n>A literature registry compiled in advance of evaluation records 54 methods and admits a method to exact scoring when both the published Indus outcome and a source-defined decision rule can be reproduced.<n> SIGIL receives the same category as the Indus corpus on every criterion scored this way, across repetition, directional-asymmetry, and lexical-distribution tests.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Statistical regularities are routinely offered as evidence that undeciphered sign systems encode language; the Indus script debate is the canonical example. Any such inference rests on specificity: the reported outcome must be unusual among plausible structured non-languages. We test that premise constructively with SIGIL, a purpose-built generative emblem system whose 3,000-text core corpus carries explicit compositional meanings although no sign has a phonological value. A literature registry compiled in advance of evaluation records 54 methods and admits a method to exact scoring when both the published Indus outcome and a source-defined decision rule can be reproduced. SIGIL receives the same category as the Indus corpus on every criterion scored this way, across repetition, directional-asymmetry, and lexical-distribution tests. Declared reconstructions of entropy, frequency, positional, predictive, classifier, and network measures reproduce the familiar Indus-like signatures as well. A sequential decipherment stress test then reaches high dictionary coverage for English, Sanskrit, and Tamil on the same corpus, while grouped held-out declines and unstable keys reveal how little that coverage identifies. The construction does not decide what the Indus signs encode: it shows that the evaluated measures detect organization without being specific to language, and therefore cannot, on their own, establish encoded speech.

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