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      <title>Making Light :: Get out your decoder rings :: comments</title>
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      <description>Language, fraud, folly, truth, history, and knitting. Et cetera.</description>
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      <title>Get out your decoder rings</title>
      <description>Imagines Italicae (via Phluzein, via LanguageHat), the Institute of Classical Studies in London, has posted a couple of mystery inscriptions...</description>
      <content:encoded>Imagines Italicae (via Phluzein, via LanguageHat), the Institute of Classical Studies in London, has posted a couple of mystery inscriptions...</content:encoded>
      <link>http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003628.html</link>
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         <title>Get out your decoder rings -- comment #1 from Joy Ralph</title>
         <description>comment from Joy Ralph on 21.Sep.03</description>
         <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Some of inscription 1 look a little like Linear B - or at least a little like the representation of Linnear B given <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/linearb.htm" rel="nofollow">here</a>. <br />
Caveat: my eye is untrained, and I'm comparing two computer-reproduced examples of presumably written script.</p>]]>
	 &lt;p&gt;Posted September 21, 2003 10:30 AM by Joy Ralph&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>
         <link>http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003628.html#28328</link>
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         <pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2003 10:30:29 -0500</pubDate>
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         <title>Get out your decoder rings -- comment #2 from Joy Ralph</title>
         <description>comment from Joy Ralph on 21.Sep.03</description>
         <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Some of inscription 1 look a little like Linear B - or at least a little like the representation of Linnear B given <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/linearb.htm" rel="nofollow">here</a>. <br />
Caveat: my eye is untrained, and I'm comparing two computer-reproduced examples of presumably written script.</p>]]>
	 &lt;p&gt;Posted September 21, 2003 10:30 AM by Joy Ralph&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>
         <link>http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003628.html#28329</link>
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         <pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2003 10:30:33 -0500</pubDate>
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         <title>Get out your decoder rings -- comment #3 from Joy Ralph</title>
         <description>comment from Joy Ralph on 21.Sep.03</description>
         <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Looks like I'm leaning to long on the keyboard this morning - strike that second 'n' in the second instance of Linear and that second copy of my post.  [Of course this happens here, when I'm trying to be extra careful.  Can I blame my cat?]</p>]]>
	 &lt;p&gt;Posted September 21, 2003 10:37 AM by Joy Ralph&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>
         <link>http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003628.html#28330</link>
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         <pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2003 10:37:09 -0500</pubDate>
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         <title>Get out your decoder rings -- comment #4 from Tom Whitmore</title>
         <description>comment from Tom Whitmore on 21.Sep.03</description>
         <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Given the second is on an erotic chalice, it's probably the equivalent of DNQ....</p>

<p>Or possibly WJC.</p>

<p>Sillily,<br />
Tom</p>]]>
	 &lt;p&gt;Posted September 21, 2003 11:02 AM by Tom Whitmore&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>
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         <pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2003 11:02:03 -0500</pubDate>
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         <title>Get out your decoder rings -- comment #5 from Erik V. Olson</title>
         <description>comment from Erik V. Olson on 22.Sep.03</description>
         <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Actually, I'd bet on WTF, myself...</p>

<p>As drawn, the first ones do look like they're hieroglyphs draw by a Greek scribe, with Greek writing instruments. Hieroglyphs were drawn with brush, then, if on stone, carved. Several of them sing Egyptian -- the top row, 2nd right is very closely related to "pr" -- <a href="http://hieroglyphs.net/000501/cgi/lookup.pl?ty=en&ch=g&cs=0" rel="nofollow">to go</a> (which was often written without the extra "r" symbol represented by the mouth shape,) the symbol to the right of that is very similar to <a href="http://www.jimloy.com/hiero/e-dict9.htm" rel="nofollow"> "ntr"</a>, which is one way of saying "God" (one way to translate Jehovan/Allah/God into Egypitan would be "ntr nfr" -- "The Good God"). The first on the second line looks similar to the determinative form of <a href="http://www.jimloy.com/hiero/dict19.htm" rel="nofollow">Set</a>, <a href="http://www.jimloy.com/hiero/dict1.htm" rel="nofollow">Anpu</a> (Greek: Anubis) or Tothh (can't find image.)</p>

<p>(You'll have to scroll. Sorry)</p>

<p>There are symbols that are close to the first/last of the top line, but not so angular (Sumerian, being pressed into clay, became angular, Egyptian, typically written by brush, stayed rounded.) The fourth of the first line looks like "shs", but rotated with a tail (rotate so the dot is on top) And that last symbol of the 2nd line (not the one alone in the lower right corner) almost screams Coptic or Greek, rather than Egyptian -- indeed, if the contest was "Pick the symbol that doesn't belong to this unknown language", that's the one that I'd pick, almost instantly. All the rest are pictoral, that one's not -- it looks like an intermediate step between <a href="http://www.ancientscripts.com/protosinaitic.html" rel="nofollow"> Phoenican and Greek</a>. </p>

<p>Indeed, they could be related, since proto-sinatic seems to derive from pictoral, but our bastardized Rho is several centuries newer than the rest of the symbols on the page. </p>]]>
	 &lt;p&gt;Posted September 22, 2003  1:43 PM by Erik V. Olson&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>
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         <pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2003 13:43:57 -0500</pubDate>
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         <title>Get out your decoder rings -- comment #6 from Kip W</title>
         <description>comment from Kip W on 23.Sep.03</description>
         <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I think the top line is, "The snake was having a smoke when his TV got up and walked away. He was blowing a soapbubble when the new one was brought in on a dolly. He (she?) smoked another cigarette.</p>

<p>After that, it gets kind of vague. There's a sort of proto-Bagge character, and then modesty prevents me from saying more. "The rest," as Ron Cottingham once said, "is too terrible to tell."<br />
</p>]]>
	 &lt;p&gt;Posted September 23, 2003  4:24 PM by Kip W&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>
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         <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2003 16:24:14 -0500</pubDate>
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