Omniglot - the blog

Language quiz

Simon on 17 Feb 2007

Language and Quiz questions | Comments (12)

12 Responses to “Language quiz”

1. Podolsky on 17 Feb 2007 at 5:44 pm #

   It looks like a Greek papyrus probably 2000 years old.

2. Clark on 17 Feb 2007 at 6:12 pm #

   Is it a fragment of a letter from Vindolanda by any chance? In which case it would be in Latin.

3. Victoria on 17 Feb 2007 at 10:30 pm #

   Complete guess but … how about sanskrit?

4. Victoria on 17 Feb 2007 at 10:32 pm #

   No, wait …. Norse?

5. Evans Knight on 17 Feb 2007 at 11:31 pm #

   theres a letter in the second line that looks like a hebrew lamed.

6. AR on 18 Feb 2007 at 12:57 am #

   It may be an ancient middle eastern script.

7. Josh on 18 Feb 2007 at 1:05 am #

   I say Latin- I’ve seen something like this before somehow associated with the Romans, but I can’t remember how.

8. Joseph Staleknight on 18 Feb 2007 at 2:34 am #

   I doubt that it was Hindi. That looks more like papyrus that it’s written on, and so should be a Mediterranean language.

   Yeah, definitely papyrus.

9. d.m.falk on 18 Feb 2007 at 5:03 am #

   Aramaic.

   d.m.f.

10. Simon on 18 Feb 2007 at 1:40 pm #

    The writing is cursive Latin handwriting. It comes from Caesarea in Mauretania and dates back to the 2nd Century AD. The text is an acknowledgement of debt.

    Source: http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/exhibits/writing/latin_cursive.html

11. Alexandra on 19 Feb 2007 at 5:38 pm #

    Latin in Roman cursive, a nightmare for any palaeography student ;)

12. James on 06 Apr 2007 at 4:59 pm #

    It looks semitic: I can see letters which look like a Lamek and a peh, but it´s not a semitic script I know and I would say that it is written L-R and not R-L - look at the slant of the letters and the direction of the weight of the pen in the cross strokes. So I don´t think semitic.

    but something old from the papyrus it´s written on. It´s also not greek. Stumped. Something old that is not semitic or greek.

    OK I looked. Latin? Well I supose it is ancient and non-semitic

    James