A few different English dictionaries include "on the left" as a current definition for sinister.
From American Heritage Dictionary 4th Ed. (En-En)
> sinister
> sin·is·ter (sin'i-st?r)
> adj.
> 4. On the left side; left.
> From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate 11 (En-En)
> sinister
> a. : of, relating to, or situated to the left or on the left side of something; especially : being or relating to the side of a heraldic shield at the left of the person bearing it
> of, relating to, or situated to the left or on the left side of something; especially : being or relating to the side of a heraldic shield at the left of the person bearing it
The bar sinister? Calling that a sense of the English word would commit you to saying that "vert" is English for "green", "gules" is English for "red", "or" is English for "gold", etc.
Nobody uses it that way — they use it to mean evil/wicked/malevolent, but then said relation will usually gibe "why yes they are very left-handed" so I have stopped using it that way lol
Agree. It merits being looks from the other side. The angle of writing seems to indicate the writing was on the other side, but looking at the document it should be clear which side has more ink.
In both cases, the left-hand side looks upside-down but the right-hand side looks right-way-up, as if the writer has rotated the page to always write on the right-hand page.
Seems likely they are right-handed, then (or, this comes from right-handed practices).
It is not Church Slavonic, at least not in any type of Cyrillic script. Could be Glagolitic but this is extremely unlikely because (a) does not look like Glagolitsa (b) Glagolitsa mostly died out 7 centuries ago.
my apologies, this is the local news station where I live and they, like most things around here are behind the times hehe, it wouldn't dawn on them to get a really comprehensive and high rest images of something like this! Hell we've made shows like colbert multiple times to be made fun of :D
Tai Le also has similar characters but some of them in the writing do no match the Tai Le Script alphabet. I.e. the cursive y with a dot in the middle or the character that looks like "-|"
Whoa I grew up Mormon and have never once heard of this script. Super interesting. There is so much Church history that they don’t teach because it’s weird in contemporary light, and this is a great example of that.
"The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement, which, according to Latter Day Saint theology, contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2200 BC to AD 421."
Sorry, everything about it is weird in any light. I hope this shit is gone before the next century.
There is a ton of info about the church that isn't widely known in Mormon circles. The CES letter does a good job covering tons of it
https://www.cesletter.org
yeah for sure, it's definitely by design. My family is quite deeply intertwined with the church, going back several generations, so it's always very interesting to see weird ways the Church tried to embed themselves. The state of Deseret and the Mormon uprisings are some of my favorite trivia to lay on people who aren't familiar with the Church and how wild it's history actually is.
The Tai Le script, or Dehong Dai script, is a Brahmic script used to write the Tai Nüa language spoken by the Tai Nua people of south-central Yunnan, China
Here's another Tai Le (aka Dehong Dai, N?a, Chinese Shan) resource w/images. [0] Many links, and a long list of related languages.
[0]https://www.omniglot.com/writing/tainua.htm
Majority of speakers (>440k) in Yunnan province. "It is also spoken in northern Vietnam, France, Laos, Myanmar, Switzerland, Thailand."
That distinctive long, vertical u-shape is used in 5 vowels. (Reminds me of Voynich)
We found some old Armenian letters in my family and it was really really hard to find someone who could read and translate. I don’t speak or read it but that was our experience.
Here what they looked like. It’s hard to compare with the low Rez but seems like not a match with this old Armenian..
The inscription within the One Ring to which the OP's quote refers was written using Tengwar, which is a script devised by the Elves and therefore "looks pretty" ;)
could be the Balinese script as it seems (to me) to be less loopy than the Javanese script. Both are abugidas and their alphabets seem to be organized just like Devanagari and scripts for other Sanskrit derived languages.
Agreed. At the least, it definitely appears to be an abugida (or possibly abjad), and the letter shapes are similar to many Brahmic scripts. My first thought was that it looked kind of like Tibetan cursive but wasn't quite the same, and after some searching it does seem like some older Burmese texts also look similar, and Javanese as well.
But, some of what I'm assuming are the vowel marks are throwing me off, since they don't look quite right for any of the writing systems mentioned so far, at least based on the descriptions I can find. Someone mentioned that it looks like the paper might have been photographed from the wrong side, so maybe this is part of the issue.
Yes, this was my feeling as well. It is very rare that calligraphy in a left-to-right writing system will have letters slanted left. It may have been a photograph from the other side. Rice paper being very thin, it might not be obvious which is the right side.
No gallows letters in this text, everything is a lot swoopier, I don't think they're related. Really wish Derek Vogt hadn't pulled his videos on Voynich and how to identify obscure writing systems.
Obviously total speculation but the illustrations and chosen subjects there make me wonder if the document(s) might be Druidic of some sort, since "ancient Druids considered it profane to record their teachings in writing": https://llewellyn.com/encyclopedia/article/186
My impression of intense focus on oral tradition isn't that such groups had no form of writing but as something analogous to modern-day Sensitive Compartmentalized Information systems to prevent anyone in the out-group from learning in-group knowledge, like how the US government has "UNCLASSIFIED / CLASSIFIED / SECRET / TOP-SECRET / TOP-SECRET-COSMIC" etc. It would be hard to describe the exact physical properties of things like plants, animals, and space without writing and illustrating them, so maybe these are documents from one such group who didn't want the fruit of their scientific studies to proliferate?
Voynich, whatever it is, is internally consistent in its glyphs. There's only a small overlap between the glyphs (at least what I can make out as distinct glyphs... always tricky when you don't know what you're looking at) in this sample compared to Voynich. Probably just coincidental, like how they all have a glyph that looks like Latin lowercase 'b'.
It's doesn't look like Cyrillic, or Georgian, or Armenian, or Hebrew, or almost any of the ideas proposed by people who have seen those scripts once or twice in passing.
Native Hebrew speaker here; this looks nothing at all like Hebrew, except for some characters having prominent ascenders and descenders that look drawn right to left.
Unfortunately, all I get when I navigate to the URL is "Access Denied". It's a pity because at the rate we're going we'll have guessed most the known scripts pretty soon.
My own guess, sight unseen, is "Bird-worm seal script"... purely because that was the answer the last time I saw this question.
(11:38 GMT) I'm filing a guess of a tourist copy of the stories of Amir Hamzah, in early 20th century handwritten Javanese. I believe the image needs to be rotated/flipped so the hole in the paper is in the top left quadrant. Will post a reference when I settle on one.
At a minimum, the word at the right end of the 5th line of this document is also seen 8 lines directly below the black hole in the subject document, which is indeed photographed from the wrong side of the paper.
As others have mentioned it might be the case that the paper has been photographed from the back side. Here are the images flipped horizontally: https://imgur.com/gallery/gv9HG1t
[0] https://media.tegna-media.com/assets/WNEP/images/323b9a63-45...
[1] https://media.tegna-media.com/assets/WNEP/images/bdb99b5f-a4...
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