What is this writing?

[Xephyr]

I saw this in a movie. I think it is probably some kind of Hebrew but I don't think I've seen this style before. Some of the strokes and letterforms remind me of the older scripts from the Iranian area: Pahlavi, Nestorian, etc. So might it be a kind of Persian Hebrew manuscript?

[Kereb]

wikipedia's article on cursive hebrew has a sample of "modern sephardic script" that looks a lot like this

[marconatrix]

Do you know the language? My guess would be some type of Aramaic?

... or then again ... isn't it just Arabic?

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

... or then again ... isn't it just Arabic?

I don't think so, but I'm not sure.

[Kereb]

what movie was it

[Xephyr]

I tried using this chart to assign some letter values. What I came up with was this:

There were some letters that I couldn't figure out:

The two on the left and the one on the right only occur word-finally, and the other two are probably ligatures, but of what I don't know, except that the one probably incorporates tau.
These words repeat:


The second I can't tell if it's s(dp or snhdp. The first one has this variant, with two letters swapped, which I think might be a scribal error:

So far as I can tell, it says this (in image form because literally no program I have DOESN'T rearrange the letters when I copypaste):


But I don't know Hebrew so I don't know how wrong that is.

[marconatrix]

If it were Hebrew you'd expect quite a few words beginning with h-, that is with the definite article, also with w- (and). If it were Aramaic you'd expect to see a lot of final alephs (their article). I don't see either so WTF is it? Some kind of cypher maybe? It's not Yiddish is it??

[Astraios]

It does look like some form of Hebrew, but I can't figure it out. Your letter values are either wrong though or it's a different language written in Hebrew script, because the transliteration into plain Hebrew letters doesn't look like Hebrew at all.

[marconatrix]

Were there any languages in the Persian empire written in aramaic script, apart obviously from aramaic itself? I'm remembering seeing fonts for "Inscriptional Pahlavi" and "Inscriptional Parthian" which IIRC seemed to be derived from "Imperial Aramaic".

[sirdanilot]

It definitely does look Semitic (the script at least, that doesn't mean the language is semitic). Perhaps some kind of Paleo-Hebrew.

[Drydic]

It definitely does look Semitic (the script at least, that doesn't mean the language is semitic). Perhaps some kind of Paleo-Hebrew.

Yay, another undefined adjective applied to Hebrew...

[din]

You said that you saw it in a movie. Could it be possible that it's the result of some prop guy scribbling something on a sheet of paper that, if you don't inspect it closely, could pass as 'middle eastern'?

[sirdanilot]

It does look kind of neat, though. Perhaps too neat for that.

I just mean an older form of Hebrew than the script most of us identify with as 'Hebrew', Drydic. I didn't have a specific paleo-hebrew script in mind. Hence the 'undefined adjective'.

[Zaarin]

Some of the symbols remind me of the D'ni script from the Myst games.

[Xephyr]

Some of the symbols remind me of the D'ni script from the Myst games.

Ah, that must be it then.

[sirdanilot]

I'm not entirely convinced it's that, though.

[Xephyr]

I'm not entirely convinced it's that, though.

!
Why not?
sarcasm insurance

[KathTheDragon]

Cos it isn't. *Is very well versed in the D'ni language*

[Xephyr]

So you're saying that the Jews of pre-modern Europe and the Middle East didn't employ the D'ni alphabet from the Myst series of video games in their manuscripts???

[KathTheDragon]

Yeah. Cos you see, the D'ni lived on the other side of the Atlantic, and the only D'ni to have moved to the surface left 10,000 years ago. Plus the remaining D'ni were extremely xenophobic already by the rise of surface civilisation.

[Drydic]

It also hurts that they DON'T FUCKING EXIST.

[KathTheDragon]

Wow, calm down. We know they don't exist.

[Drydic]

Well you guys sure did a good job of fooling me. In fact I don't believe that some of you don't think that. Why was it even brought up in the first place? What purpose would there be in faking an ancient Canaanite script? It's a rather obscure subject for chantards, about the only people I'd routinely expect to put this level of effort into a trolling.

[KathTheDragon]

Some of the symbols remind me of the D'ni script from the Myst games.

[Zaarin]

The OP said he saw it in a movie; Hollywood is hardly notorious for historical accuracy. That's why I brought it up. Not because I suspect a made up culture infiltrated the ancient Near East with their writing. -_-