Recently, ALTA received a fax from a law firm with a request to translate an attached document. Strangely, the lawyers had received this document enclosed in an envelope with no return address, and with no English indication as to what the sender wanted done. We receive translation requests daily, but this one was quite odd. The lawyers couldn’t decipher the language that was printed on the tattered page. It was a single sheet of thick, yellowing paper, about half-filled with ornate characters that looked “maybe Arabic?” — as the lawyers wondered. But it was not Arabic.

It was not anything that we at ALTA had ever seen before. The mystery document was passed around the office and we attempted to identify the source language. A few of us offered educated guesses based on the diacritical marks and some other aspects of the script, but no one could determine the language exactly. We scanned it and sent it out to a few translators who specialize in East African, Middle Eastern, and East Asian languages. A couple of them responded with the theory that we had uncovered an example of a Manichean script that was banned centuries ago!

They were wrong. It took ALTA’s resident language sleuth and linguist, Wes Cook, to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Here is the story, in the Language Sleuth’s own words:

It was a dark and stormy night and the office was in a stir about a letter from a lawyer. The letter was written in an unusual alphabet that resembled some modern and some ancient scripts. But it certainly wasn’t Manichean.

Manichean script was used by the followers of the Gnostic religion of the founding prophet “Mani” between the third and sixth centuries. As a linguist, my professional opinion was that the document was some sort of hoax, and not, in fact, an example of any rare ancient language. So, I put on my sleuth hat and got to work.

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