Runes? Roman? Ogham!

[learnteach]

Recently a series of lines, jumbled together in their medium, were uncovered and examined by me. Pondering their meaning, I tried to decipher them as runes, but they weren't clear enough. Thinking perhaps the roman style script (all were straight lines) I reexamined them, but there seemed to be no common axis. In fact, the lines looked like vertical and diagonal hatches on a base line which was curved into a spiral.

Going on this hunch, I investigated Ogham, and after finding a very cool website:
http://ogham.lyberty.com/
I was able to decipher the runes...
leaving out the scholarship, they translated to:
blocc th ng shots.

Hmm. Interesting bruise after war practice tonight....:)

Comments

Linear B

[metageek.livejournal.com]

At my company, there's a disused whiteboard that has become the trivia question board. While the person who puts up questions was on vacation, I decided to put up one of my own: "What is the oldest language used in our product?" It was meant as a trick question; I was hoping people would guess programming languages. But no; the first person who replied said English, which was correct, as far as I knew.

Fine. But then yesterday someone answered "Latin", and I thought, "I can top that". So I went to the Unicode charts and looked at the available scripts. Hebrew and Linear B looked like good candidates; I googled around and found AncientScripts.com, which provided a timeline of scripts; I quickly determined that Linear B was the oldest for which there are Unicode characters. AncientScripts.com also provided an explanation of the Linear B syllabary, so that I could transyllabate modern names into Linear B, and a link to a glossary of Mycenaean words written in Linear B (very small, as you'd expect). Thus armed, I equipped the product with an Easter egg written entirely in Linear B. After running regression tests (you never know!) and checking it in, I went back to the trivia board and wrote "Linear B".

I'm not just a computer geek. :-)

Re: Linear B

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

I can't think of anyone who'd use the word "just".

As I recall, the quote was "Please don't hurt me, Techno-John."