Peter_Constable@... wrote:

>
> Scott:
>
> These are interesting comparisons. Your characters are, apparently,
> Devanagari, and the lack of a top line made me think of Gujarati. The first
> character looks strikingly similar to Gujarati lla, the fourth and the
> second-to-last like Gujarati pa, and the sixth like Gujarati la (see
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0A80.pdf for Gujarati samples). The
> second is like Gujarati ga but with a top line. But I can't match every
> character in the sample with modern Gujarati characters.
>
> It seems likely, though, that this sample could represent some common
> ancestor to northern Indic scripts. At least, that's the best hypothesis
> I've seen yet (after entertaining suggestions as diverse as Demotic, Khmer
> and Georgian). Thanks for the insight.

These guesses about Indic scripts are all very nice, but do any of them
result in actual words of some Indic language (let alone a coherent
phrase)? The absence of any vowel but /a/ (and a single stray /u/) would
seem to render this highly improbable!
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...