Dr. Steven Bonta

Dr. Steven Bonta holds an MA in linguistics from BYU and a PhD in linguistics from Cornell, where he specialized in South Asian languages. He has conducted field research on minority Dravidian dialects in Sri Lanka, and is a two-time Fulbright recipient. He is competent in several South Asian languages both classical and modern, including Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, and Sinhala. He is also fluent in several European languages, including Spanish and French, as well as Mandarin Chinese. Dr. Bonta is widely published in anthropological and contact linguistics, and also in Peircean semiotics.

In addition to his contributions to contact linguistics and semiotics, Dr. Bonta for more than thirty years has worked on the problem of the Indus script, including an MA thesis on the subject. He now has a paper under review summarizing the results of his partial decipherment, which is also available in fuller form in his latest as-yet-unpublished monograph, “A Partial Decipherment of the Indus Script: Proposed Phonetic and Logographic Values for Selected Indus Signs and Readings of Indus Texts.”