Mysterious medallion inscription

This medallion belonged to Kevin Silver’s father and was believed to be his grandfather’s originally. Kevin has been told is “probably” a protection device that his grandfather wore to protect himself from harm and evil spirits. His grandfather was an Orthodox Jew from Russia who was very religious.

Kevin has tried to match the letter to the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Ancient Greek, Russian, & Ancient Russian alphabets without success. Can you help?

Medallion with mysterious inscription

I’ve decided to put puzzles on this blog to make it possible for you leave comments rather than having to send them to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

Solution from Aharon Shmuel

The language is Hebrew written in the Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet (abjad). The script is taken from the style used on coins minted during the Jewish revolts against Rome; indeed, this seems to be a replica of a coin from that period.

The text reads שנת אחת לגאלת ישראל; SHNAT ACHAT LEGE’ULAT YISRAEL; year one of Israel’s redemption. This phrase was used on coins minted during the revolts. In fact, Israel has issued stamps featuring ancient coins with this exact phrase on them: here and here.

One interesting feature here is the backwards letter Gimmel (the 8th letter, reading from right to left). I’ve been scouring the internet looking for an example of coins from this period with a backward Gimmel, but each one I’ve found has been facing forward. This, along with the owners comments, leads me to believe that this replica was made by a reader/writer of the Cyrillic alphabet who mixed up the Gimmel with the corresponding letter Ge – after all, what is a Cyrillic Ge if not a backward Gimmel.

Also, the Alephs are inconsistent (4th, 9th & 15th letters), and the Nun (2nd letter) looks more like a Mem but that could just be the picture quality.

As a side note, the current 1 and 10 New Israeli Shekel coins make use of Paleo-Hebrew; the ₪10 has a similar phrase, לגאלת ציון; LEGE’ULAT TZION; for the redemption of Zion.

All in all, a very cool coin to have – I’m jealous. As far as protection from spirits etc., could well have been intended for that. I’d wear it if I had it. -Aharon

Word of the day – morglawdd

In Welsh morglawdd is the word for a tidal barrage (lit. “sea bank, dyke, earthwork or hedgerow”). I heard this word during a discussion on Radio Cymru of plans to build such a barrage across the Severn Estuary and I just liked the sound of it.

The plans are opposed by many environmental groups who prefer an alternative proposal to build an artificial reef or greigres artiffisial, which would cost less, produce more power, and would have less environmental impact.

There are more details of the project on the BBC website in English and Welsh.

Word of the day – iff

I came across today’s word, iff, in the syntax textbook I’m reading at the moment (Introduction to Government and Binding Theory). When I spotted it I thought at first that it was a typo, but have since discovered that it is used in logic to mean “if and only if”.

Iff can also be represented by the following symbols: ↔, ⇔ or ≡

Quite a few other symbols are used in logic, and to some extent in linguistics textbooks on semantics and syntax. They include:

⇒ / → / ⊃ = if … then
¬ / ˜ = not
⊕ / ⊻ = xor (exclusive or)
∀ = for all/any/each
∃ = there exists
⊢ = infers or is derived from

I vaguely remember learning some of these in maths classes many moons ago and still haven’t quite recovered! I tend to skip parts of books and articles that use them.

Source: Wikipedia

Up to your ears?

When you’re very busy, you can say that you’re up to your ears with work, as I was last week with reports, presentations, an essay and lots of reading to do.

In English you can also say that you’re up to your eyes, eyeballs, elbows or neck, snowed under, drowning, swamped, rushed/run off your feet with/in work.

Are there equivalent phrases in other languages?

Mimetic bootstrapping

Yesterday I went to an interesting talk on Japanese mimetic words, which are onomatopoeia (擬声語 giseigo / 擬音語 giongo) or words connected to actions, emotions or states (擬態語 gitaigo). For example, くすくす (kusu kusu) – to giggle,ぐずぐず[する] (guzu guzu [suru]) – to procrastinate or dawdle.

Researchers in Japan have found that Japanese mothers use a much higher proportion of mimetic words with young children (60%) than with adults (10%), and their experiments found that children find mimetic verbs (those that use sound symbolism) easier to learn than non-mimetic verbs. They call this process mimetic bootstrapping. They also tested English-speaking children and adults using Japanese mimetic verbs and found that they were able to guess their meanings above the level of chance.

They also mentioned that mimetic words are not just found in Japanese – they are in fact found in the form similar to gitaigo in many of the worlds languages, though are rare in Indo-European languages.

Hebrew question

This is a question I received recently to which I don’t know the answer. Can you help?

Can you please tell me something about Hebrew. I want to know if the Hebrew we get in Biblica Hebraica, which I think is based on the masoretic text, used gender specific pronouns. Are references made to he and she with a different term for each as in English or is only one term used as in Thai?

I particularly need to know if I am correct in thinking that God is referred to with “He” “him” and “his” as the translators of the New Amer. Std. seem to think. Of course, in English, they have no choice. We don’t have a gender neutral term for a human being. So I just need to know what the original Hebrew is like. I hope you know. Thanks.

Gensis 1:27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Chinese etymology

Yesterday I found a useful looking website about Chinese Etymology which shows variant forms of characters including Oracle Bone characters (甲骨文 jiăgŭwén), Bronze characters (金文 jīnwén) and Grass script characters (草書 căoshū). Some characters have many forms in the older versions of the Chinese script – up to 50 or so in some cases.

It also has information about the etymology and history of characters and written Chinese.

Another useful website I came across recently is a Chinese text annotation tool, which adds pop-up annotations containing pinyin transcriptions and English translations when you move your cursor over the characters in a Chinese text. The annotations can be applied to web pages or to Chinese texts pasted in the box on that site.