Dear List,
This paper that Andrew has passed on to us has many flaws, and these flaws are not just a matter of personal animosity. The paper certainly should have included reference to Asko Parpola's book, and all of his previous works on this topic. It should have included reference to other competent philologists and linguists as well. Witzel is mentioned only in association with Farmer and Sprout, but he has done much significant work elsewhere on substrate languages in early Vedic [especially our oldest text the RV, where we find many foreign, non-Indo-European words [see Kuiper's famous list of some 380 foreign words in the RV ]. Because of these sorts of studies, done by philologists and linguists, we have reasonably good confidence to assert that Dravidian has a good chance of being the language of IVC as Asko argues, because there is good evidence that it was there, well before the RV]. There is also a reasonably good chance that a Munda language was there as well, a language possibly spoken in IVC, because we have good evidence that these two language families were present in the area occupied by the IVC at the dates when it flourished. By the time the Vedic clans arrived in this area the IVC was long dead. But some IVC words and ideas may have survived, though rarely, in the Rgveda.
Among specialists in the RV , RV 10.106 is generally considered to be the most difficult hymn in the RV [see , for example Geldner, Renou, and most recently Jamison & Brereton). Kuiper has even suggested that this hymn was composed by a bilingual Rgvedic poet; if he was bilingual, we need to find out what his second language was]. Philologists with expertise in the languages that are known or are likely to have been present in the IVC area during its flourishing period need to examine these foreign words in the RV.
Another factor not much discussed here is that IVC was a huge territory, and therefore it is likely that it was a multilingual culture. It is possible therefore that the IVC sign system was a non-linguistic sign-system, as suggested by Farmer, Sprout, & Witzel, a long time ago, that was meant to communicate to many linguistic communities through visual rather than verbal signs .
Yes, this was a superficial article. But it's comparison of Farmer to Trump is not entirely wrong. Those two do share so many character traits that it is conceivable that they may be born twins, culturally speaking.
For those who wonder about Bryan Wells who claims to be an epigrapher: is he really an epigrapher? It may well be that he doesn't actually claim to be one, and that this poorly informed journalist didn't know what the term actually means. Bryan Wells, as far as I know, has fruitfully studied the IVC signs for a long time, but I have never seen any evidence that he has significant knowledge of any of the languages that may have been or were in play in IVC at the relevant time-period.
List members who are seriously interested in this question should read Parpola, Kuiper, Witzel, et al. The computer models discussed in this article need to be linked to relevant languages.
My two-cents.
George Thompson