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Comments on What language is this (cursive) sample?

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What language is this (cursive) sample?

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A recent post on Language Log includes this sample of an unidentified language:

13 lines of right-justified text, maybe a numbered list

The article says this about the source:

This is from RG 84, General Correspondence of the American consulate in Tangier, Morocco. The dates of the stuff is either 1912 or 1917.

The authors, and comments on the post, offer several speculations rooted in Semitic languages. Proposals include Ladino, a form of cursive Rashi script (Hebrew), cursive Canaanite (though I wouldn't expect that in the 20th century, assuming the source info is correct), and Solitreo.

To me it looks like the writing is different in different parts of the sample, which makes we wonder about multiple scribes or multiple languages. The second and third lines and the last two look very different to me.

What language or languages are we looking at here? Can anyone help our friends at Language Log?

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posted over 3 years ago
3y ago by Moshi‭
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2 comment threads

Ladino in Solitreo - a solid possibility (1 comment)
Google Translate auto-detect says Persian or Urdu (2 comments)
Ladino in Solitreo - a solid possibility
Jirka Hanika‭ wrote about 3 years ago
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Of the options offered, Ladino written in Solitreo makes by far the most sense. Ladino would be the language, also called Judezmo, and Solitreo would be the "Sephardic cursive" script used to write the language.

It's really hard to run into a native speaker of Ladino these days, it's a dying language. And that elderly Ladino speaker would likely be using the Latin alphabet to write it, unlike a hundred years ago. However, by 1912 or so, a quarter of the population of Tangier were Jews, and while they were likely to study in French, Hebrew, Spanish or Arabic at school, I suppose that many or most of them were using Ladino at home.

If anybody wants to explore this further, here is a resource that might help: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/541a57f5e4b0fcd826cfa24f/t/5903910215d5dbab742bf1e2/1493405969236/A+guide+to+reading+%26+writing+Judezmo.pdf

That said, I'm still unable to transcribe this, much less translate any of it.