A 17th century scrap of paper may contain traces of a lost South American language.

“It’s a little piece of paper with a big story to tell,” says Dr. Jeffrey Quilter, who has conducted investigations in Peru for more than three decades, and is director of the archaeological project at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, where the paper was excavated in 2008. Quilter explains this simple list offers “a glimpse of the peoples of ancient and early colonial Peru who spoke a language lost to us until this discovery.”

The writing is a set of translations from Spanish names of numbers (uno, dos, and tres) and Arabic numerals (4–10, 21, 30, 100, and 200) to the unknown language. Some of the translated numbers have never been seen before, while others may have been borrowed from Quechua or a related language. Quechua is still spoken today in Peru, along with Spanish, but in the early 17th century, many languages were spoken in the region, such as Quingnam and Pescadora. Information about them today is limited. Even so, the archaeologists were able to deduce that the lost language speakers used a decimal system like our own.

“The find is significant because it offers the first glimpse of a previously unknown language and number system,” says Quilter. “It also points to the great diversity of Peru’s cultural heritage in the early Colonial Period. The interactions between natives and Spanish were far more complex than previously thought.”

The name of the lost language is still a mystery. The American-Peruvian research team was able to eliminate Mochica, spoken on the North Coast into the Colonial Period but now extinct, and point to Quingnam and Pescadora as possible candidates. Neither Quingnam nor Pescadora, however, have been documented beyond their names. There is even a possibility that Quingnam and Pescadora are the same language but they were identified as separate tongues in early Colonial Spanish writings, so a definitive connection remains impossible to establish.

[Full story]

An examination of papers found in an attic in 1999, and acquired by the Tate Archive, contain references to a hunchback sculptor working at Notre Dame during the time period Victor Hugo’s The Hunch Back of Notre Dame was being written.

Clues suggesting that Quasimodo is based on a historical figure have been uncovered in the memoirs of Henry Sibson, a 19th-century British sculptor who was employed at the cathedral at around the time the book was written and who describes a hunched back stonemason also working there.

The documents were acquired by the Tate Archive in 1999 after they were discovered in the attic of a house in Penzance, Cornwall, as the owner prepared to move out.

However, the references to a “hunchback sculptor” working at Notre Dame have only just been discovered, as the memoirs are catalogued ahead of the archive’s 40th anniversary this year.

The seven-volume memoirs document Sibson’s time in Paris during the 1820s, when he was employed by contractors to work on repairs to Notre Dame Cathedral.

In one entry, he writes: “the [French] government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and it was now in progress … I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures [for Notre Dame] and here I met with a Mons. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers.”

[Full story]

The mystery surrounding the ancient Pictish language is deepening as linguits examine the Pict stones in Scotland.

They used a mathematical method to quantify patterns contained within the symbols, in an effort to find out if they conveyed meaning.

Professor Lee described the basis of this method.

“If I told you the first letter of a word in English was ‘Q’ and asked you to predict the next letter, you would probably say ‘U’ and you would probably be right,” he explained.

“But if I told you the first letter was ‘T’ you would probably take many more guesses to get it right – that’s a measure of uncertainty.”

Using the symbols, or characters, from the stones, Prof Lee and his colleagues measured this feature of so-called “character to character uncertainty”.

They concluded that the Pictish carvings were “symbolic markings that communicated information” – that these were words rather than pictures.

[Full story]

The I Love Typography blog has put up a fascinating post about the origins of our ABC. It’s worth the read.

We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc. Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we will need to travel much farther back in time, to an era contemporaneous with the emergence of (agricultural) civilisation itself.

Robert Bringhurst wrote that writing is the solid form of language, the precipitate.[1] But writing is also much more than that, and its origins, its evolution, and the way it is now woven into the fabric of civilisations makes it a truly wonderful story. That story spans some 5,000 years. We’ll travel vast distances, meet an emperor, a clever Yorkshireman, a Phoenician princess by the name of Jezebel, and the ‘purple people’; we’ll march across deserts and fertile plains, and sail across oceans. We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.

[Full story]

A tiny clay fragment, dating back 3,400 years, is the oldest text discovered in Jerusalem.

The clay chip is a key find which indicates the importance of the city in the Bronze Age, around 1,400 BC, researchers at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said.

It was discovered during an excavation in an area just south of the walls of the Old City in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

The miniscule chip is believed to have been part of the royal archives and indicates the importance of Jerusalem as a major city in the late Bronze Age, the Hebrew University said in a statement.

The clay fragment was found by researchers sifting through debris removed from beneath a tower from the 10th century BC.

According to an expert from the university’s Institute of Archaeology, the script on the fragment, which contains snippets of words such as “you were” and “them,” appears to have been very carefully formed.

[Full story]