Front-back vowel harmony is an important characteristic of many languages. Testing whether an untranslated script has vowel harmony may aid its decipherment. This paper tests vowel harmony for three different modern languages (Hungarian, Spanish and Turkish) as well as the extinct underlying language of the undeciphered Indus Valley script. We also introduce a novel vowel harmony index based on the Exponential Random Graph Model for graphs. To achieve this, we first select words from each of the modern languages (Hungarian, Turkish, and Spanish) from their Swadesh list. Then we divide each word into syllables, isolating the vowels. We then analyze the three modern languages using Exponential Random Graph Model methods. The results indicate that this procedure and the vowel harmony index are feasible to define the degree of vowel harmony in a language. The procedure is then extended to the undeciphered Indus Valley Script. Our results indicate that the underlying language of the Indus Valley Script also had vowel harmony. We found that on average the odds of the IVS having vowel harmony were 6.61 times higher than would be found in a random graph.

Python is a multi-paradigm programming language that fully supports object-oriented (OO) programming. The language allows writing code in a non-procedural imperative manner, using procedures, using classes, or in a functional style. To date, no one has studied what paradigm(s), if any, are predominant in Python code and projects. In this work, we first define a technique to classify Python files into predominant paradigm(s). We then automate our approach and evaluate it against human judgements, showing over 80% agreement. We then analyze over 100k open-source Python projects, automatically classifying each source file and investigating the paradigm distributions. The results indicate Python developers tend to heavily favor OO features. We also observed a positive correlation between OO and procedural paradigms and the size of the project. And despite few files or projects being predominantly functional, we still found many functional feature uses.