Please identify the language

[vijayjohn]

Oh OK, thanks!

[Karavinka]

From the language itself, I can tell it is a Sumerian royal inscription. Probably originally incised on a temple brick, saying basically who built it for what god The letterforms are typical for the "classical" Sumerian. I can take a closer look later if the OP wants, I am on a train now.

Btw, if you want to display it right, the line with the four symbols comes on top, and it is written horizontally left to right.

[vijayjohn]

Woohoo, I was right! Thanks, Karavinka!!

[księżycowy]

Thanks Karavinka. I was kinda waiting for you to show up.

[Vlürch]

Am I the only one who can't see the pic? Just a thing with the text "please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting"?

[IpseDixit]

Am I the only one who can't see the pic?

No, you're not.

[vijayjohn]

I could see it at first but not now. I assume the user took it off or something.

[Osias]

Most probably it reached some kind of quota.

[Sirsunny1]

Dear forum members,

Above you can find the picture of a metal bowl.
It is quite old i believe.

My knowledge of greek/russian/Cyrillic is minimal so i can't recognize the language.
My thought after doing sone research is that it is maybe a somewhat older cyrllic language.
Can any of the forum member maybe recognize this language? And if yes, i would be absolutely grateful if someone can translate the sentences or parts of it.

I hope someone has time to look at the text.

Kind regards,

A new forum member

[IpseDixit]

It looks more like Greek written with the Uncial script rather than Cyrillic. This is the only piece of information I can give you. I have no idea what it says.

[Mult1ple]

Screenshot_2017-11-04-20-59-57-2-1.png

[vijayjohn]

Well, 佛手瓜 means chayote squash in Chinese...

[Osias]

Mandarin or Cantonese?

[Osias]

By the way "chayote squash" in Portuguese is "chuchu", a term that can also used as equivalent to calling someone "sweet", "honey", "darling", etc. It's kind of dated, but I remember reading there was also a French term like this, "chouchou", where this came from. Maybe the intent of the tatoo was to reproduce this "phonetically".

What is the place and date of the image?

[Car]

By the way "chayote squash" in Portuguese is "chuchu", a term that can also used as equivalent to calling someone "sweet", "honey", "darling", etc. It's kind of dated, but I remember reading there was also a French term like this, "chouchou", where this came from. Maybe the intent of the tatoo was to reproduce this "phonetically".

What is the place and date of the image?

There is the French term "chouchou" with that meaning indeed. They simply doubled "chou" (source) ("chou" means "cabbage" in French).

[Osias]

Mandarin or Cantonese?

[vijayjohn]

Wait, is that a serious question? 佛手瓜 isn't a term that's specific to any particular variety of Chinese. Most things in written Chinese aren't as far as I'm aware.

[Osias]

It's a serious question, I never understood fully the relationship between written Chinese and the several spoken languages. I know individual characters are of course, multilingual, and two-symbol compounds I see often in Japanese and I think they have the same meaning in Mandarim at least, but 3? Interesting.

[vijayjohn]

I guess the way I think of it is basically as follows: Written Chinese tends to suit Mandarin well. Since all modern varieties of Chinese essentially share the same ancestor (Middle Chinese) and borrowing between varieties (especially from Mandarin into other varieties) is common, it suits the other varieties of Chinese to varying degrees as well. However, there is usually no (standardized or widely accepted) way of encoding non-Mandarin dialect-specific features in written Chinese (with some notable exceptions, e.g. Cantonese can and is actually written with characters that represent Cantonese-specific words).

It's relatively easy to write Mandarin in Chinese characters; people do this all the time. To some extent, even dialect variation within Mandarin can be represented using Chinese characters. However, representing spoken Cantonese using Chinese characters is much harder. Representing Qingtianese using Chinese characters is almost impossible since the etymologies of Qingtianese words are often rather unclear. When people do try to write Qingtianese with Chinese characters, what they mostly end up doing AFAICT is just using characters whose Mandarin pronunciation sounds similar to the Qingtianese words.

佛手瓜 is literally Buddha + hand + melon, so I guess a melon that looks like Buddha's hand? In general, in Chinese, it's very common to put nouns together to form what may seem like very long compounds sometimes. Sometimes, these can be broken up using the possessive particle 的 (pronounced de in Mandarin; I'm not sure to what extent other varieties of Chinese use this particular particle), but (Mandarin) Chinese-speakers avoid using too many 的's in succession. 佛手瓜, however, is a fixed expression. In Mandarin, it's pronounced fóshǒuguā. In Cantonese, it's fat⁶ sau² gwaa¹. In Taiwanese, it's hu̍t-chhiú-koe.

That totally made sense and was easy to understand, right?

[Osias]

Yes, yes, thank you very much! This post could become a blog post somewhere!