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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

A Possible Crib: "Forty days and forty nights"

There are two similar passages in the Rohonc codex where the number 40 is written twice in succession, as in the following case on page 5 line R11:

B1CU CURE B1CU CO D CO D IX T T T T D T T T T K1OA A D CX

And also the following, starting on page 120 L9 and ending on 121 R1:


B1CU IX XB B1CU C D CO D IX T T T T D
IX T T T T X2 K O A D CX CURJX XB B1CU C XB B1CU

The two passages are nearly parallel, but not entirely so. In the first one, the glyphs K and O were written so closely together that my transcription code took them to be a ligature, K1OA. In the second, they are clearly written separately. The second version also repeats IX before the second instance of the number 40, and appears to have a double dot after the last T of the sequence representing 40.

I googled the phrase "quadraginta * quadraginta", to get a rough idea of cases in Latin texts where the number 40 is repeated twice in close succession. (I used Latin in order to select texts in the right semantic domain and era, not because I have decided the language of this text is Latin.) As I had guessed, the most common phrase was quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus, "for forty days and forty nights". This is the period of time for which it rained in Noah's flood, and the period of time for which Jesus fasted in the desert.

If this is a crib, then I suggest the following:

IX: a preposition like "for". Its second appearance on page 121 is completely natural, making only the difference between "for forty days and forty nights" and "for forty days and for forty nights".

T T T T: the number "forty"

D: "days" (or an abbreviation therefor)

K O A: "night" (perhaps plural, perhaps inflected)

It is possible that the word "nights" should include all of the glyphs K O A D CX, but I propose minimally K O A on the basis of page 13 L2:


XU CC D C XVA CV QO ? ? ? XDAS N IX I XVOA N

The end of this line contains the sequence IX I XVOA, where XVOA (a relatively common glyph) looks very much like a ligature of K O A. If so, then this sequence could read "for one night".

Some languages use the singular noun after a number greater than one, while others use the plural. It is possible that D CX contains a plural marker, but an analysis of numbers throughout the text should be done before we say that.

The XVOA glyph appears 65 times in my current transcription, overwhelmingly in the sequence C XVOA C. It may be fruitful to hunt for languages where a relatively common word contains within it the sounds of the word for "night".

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