Title: A cladistic approach to the evolution of steppe scripts

Authors: Timea Puskás; Gábor Hosszú

Addresses: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Department of Electron Devices, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 1111 Budapest, Műegyetem rkp. 3, Hungary ' Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Department of Electron Devices, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 1111 Budapest, Műegyetem rkp. 3, Hungary

Abstract: The paper deals with the cladistic modelling of the evolution of specific pattern systems, namely historical scripts. A pattern system is a specific form of symbolic communication consisting of symbols and syntactic rules. The evolutionary study of pattern systems is called pattern evolution. The main obstacle to phylogenetic modelling of historical scripts as special pattern systems is the small number of features, which means a high risk of homoplasies. Therefore, their evolution cannot be analysed directly using cladistic methods but only applying phenetic analysis in certain cases. Previous research extended the phenetic model with evolutionary considerations, and a successive elimination procedure was developed to avoid homoplasies. Thus, the resulting database is already suitable for cladistic analysis. The procedure described in this paper illustrates cladistic analysis performed this way. The end result is a most parsimonious cladogram illustrating the evolution of the scripts of the steppe peoples.

Keywords: cladistics; consistency index; machine learning; pattern evolution; pattern system; phenetics; retention index; Rovash scripts; scriptinformatics; Wagner method.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIEI.2022.123698

International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, 2022 Vol.10 No.1, pp.52 - 73

Received: 03 Dec 2021
Accepted: 17 Feb 2022
Published online: 30 Jun 2022 *

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