Malay / English version of the Rubaiyat
Who knows … someone might get lucky
Note: The Malay alphabet has a phonetic orthography; words are spelt the way they are pronounced, with few exceptions. The letter Q, V and X are rarely encountered, being chiefly used for writing loanwords, being words adopted from a foreign language with little or no modification.
The letter Q is found the French translation.
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Did the code boffins determine that the letter frequency and patterns pointed to an English-language acrostic?
I guess they may not have had other languages on their minds.
Find a Rubaiyat written in a foreign language and using the English alphabet with a Q and a double T in one of the quatrains …
Polish is probably out, based on the q. German is definitely in, but I can’t find a matching verse online.
The Roman alphabet is the most widely used in the world (orthographiesofthe world.wordpress.com) – the major users being the English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Czech, Polish, Croatian … about as many languages as the Rubaiyat was published.
I picked on Polish because of the DNA, but Polish doesn’t use a Q (except for loan words). Moving west slightly, I’d say German is an option, but the lack of any umlaut in the characters makes me a bit wary.
It looks like a process of finding every online Rubaiyat written in Roman letters and scouring same for a quatrain that has a Q and double T’s … I’ve got Malay, French and German ..
I looked for v70 in German, but it wasn’t in the selection I found online.
don’t forget it’s v70 in the early fitzgerald translations – I think in later ones it’s 94 or something – so in other languages (or even other English translations) won’t necessarily map 1-1
On emakbakea.files.wordpress.com “The R… by Edward Fitzgerald, It’s v90.
In the fifth edition the v70 “Indeed…” is verse 94. I too think German could be in. ABD is commonly used short for Abend (evening), SAMSTAG is a common word for Saturday in German and could be spelled or encrypted wrong (SAMSTGA). And to me personally the i everyone sees after ML looks much more like a stroke or a slash, you call it – possibly to indicate separation of meaning or start of new topic? That’s because it was written differently, the movement is slightly round to the left whereas the i’s go slightly to the right. As for different languages I have looked at the German Rubáiyát for clues as well, no luck so far.