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Comment by nsajko | Hacker News Reader

This contains just 70 legible letters and punctuation marks, less than your comment; so there's not really that much potential for understanding new words.

The largest Etruscan body of text we have is 1200 words, it somehow ended up as wrappings for a mummy in Egypt.

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> The largest Etruscan body of text we have is 1200 words, it somehow ended up as wrappings for a mummy in Egypt.

Very cool, I'd never heard of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus

Yes, I didn't get why Annalee Newitz (Ars Technica) wrote: "the stele contains 70 legible letters and punctuation marks" and on the other hand writes: "Scientists believe it will be full of words and concepts they've never encountered before" It makes it out to be some kind of revolutionary Rosetta's Stone, but with 70 characters this is even less then the Faistos Disk of that other enigmatic civilization, the Minoans. I think 'full of words' is a bit overstated - in the Italian reporting it's said that because of the different genre compared to the regular finds we have the scholars will probably encounter some new words (which would be around < 10) probably including the deity of the temple.

I guess it can be overstated.

I guess so!

Half a tweet.

It could be an extraordinarily expressive language, though. Think about what Japanese writers can do with 140 characters.

This made me want to Google 'Japanese entropy bits' and the first hit for me was this paper: http://www.phontron.com/paper/neubig13sam.pdf

"How Much is Said in a Tweet? A Multilingual, Information-theoretic Perspective"

I think what you want is presented in a figure on page 6.

So while Japanese tweeters could express more than English tweeters in the same character count, they generally don't choose to. That's pretty interesting.

Etruscan was written in a predecessor of the Latin alphabet we still use (albeit omitting most vowels), so no, it's not going to have a huge amount of information.

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