Markers and agencies of anisotropy in the Indus sign system

Abstract

An animal symbol faces a sign on 33 Indus seal-impressions. Using this ‘frontality’ as a benchmark, this paper verifies the following: 1. The validity of a line break in a frontal sequence and elsewhere in a corpus of at least 2906 objects, 2. Sign order and reading direction in the benchmark dataset and the rest of the corpus, 3. Sign oder, transposed sign order, and the signals of transposition (the markers and agencies of anisotropy) which follow five rules, labelled D1–D5, besides a violation of these rules, labelled Dx, 4. That the system is minimally isotropic, labelled D0, 5. How a frontal sequence prescribes a sign order that others follow or signal it with a marker when they do not, 6. A relationship between sign and symbol that is analogous with ‘A for Apple’, 7. The design logic of the Indus sign system and how formative signs are transformed by sign doubling, mirroring, repetitive stringing, and a finite set of intrinsic and extrinsic markers, 8. The precise functional value of four Indus graphemes, one marker, IM-99, to signal a transposition, another marker, IM-98, to conceal a sign string, and two more markers, IM-97 and 123, to differentiate signs with identical multiples, and 9. How a seal in the frontal dataset talks to another seal. The above are understood through a simulation to study sign position in relation to sign transposition. A transposed sign order is created taking a naturally occurring sign order from a frontal seal. The study then seeks the recurrence of this ‘cooked’ order elsewhere in the corpus and reports the cause and effect of transposition, respectively, agency and marker. The study is range-relaxed and explains adjacent sign behaviour, as well as distant sign behaviour.