Hi, I’m online on my phone fRom Canada, so keeping it brief. I need your help my dopers.
My mom passed away on Friday. She is being cremated and my sister wants the box her ashes are in to bear a little silver plaque that mom has kept forever. We thought the writing was Icelandic but an Icelandic speaker we know says that it isn’t. If it were in English you would think it says “At Rest”
but we’ve been told that it is not English. The “t” at the end of each word is not really a “t”. It’s one of those letters that are not used in English, so I can’t even tell you what it’s called. What it looks most like to me is almost a miniature capital A, so Aa Resa.Our Icelandic friend thought the words might be Swedish or Norweigan. Any thoughts on what this might say?
Is there anything else about this “A” you could tell us? Like how does it differ from an English “A”? Because I can’t think of any letters in the Norwegian or Swedish alphabets that fit the description. The non-English letters in Swedish are “A” with a circle on top, “A” with two dots (an umlaut) on top, and an “O” with the umlaut (or: å ,ä ,ö). Norweigan has an AE ligature/smooshed together, an “O” with a slash, and an “A” with the circle. (or: æ , ø, å)
Ok, I’m on my sister’s computer now, so can be a little more descriptive. It does not really look like any of the letters that you mention. You know when writing in English, the way you write a small letter i with a curve up and a curve back down? It’s kind of like that except it’s got a wider gap at the top. In a small i you go up and then almost straight back down on the same path. In this letter, there’s an upward curve, a small movement at the top of the curve from left to right, then a downward curve. I’ll see what I can do about a picture.
Not that this makes it the truth, but we were definately told that it was not English by Mom. She did tell my sister long ago the significance of this thing, but my sister no longer remembers the story. She thinks that it was something that belonged to my mother’s grandmother. I think we’ll probably just put it on the box since it’s one of the few things she has kept to the last days, but it would just be nice to know where it might have come from.
To me that looks like an Aa, which is the old way of writing the sound now written as å. It’s pronounced as an O sound, but not exactly like an O. You still see it in proper names and historical-type dramas. I don’t know what the phrase means; in Danish the word å means a small brook (or else the equivalent of Oh!), but I wouldn’t know about anything else.
Another vote for At Rest. That definitely looks like a t to me, and although the way the crossbar is drawn makes it resemble the A you can see the difference at the top of the letter. The clincher is that all the letters save the initial A and R are minuscule or lower case; if it were A/a or any nordic variant of that letter it would have the minuscule form and not resemble the upper case A at all.
I think he’s right. It nearly means ‘to travel’ in some sort of Scandinavian. But not quite. Å (aa) means ‘to’ in Norwegian, resa means travel in Swedish.
Might it be Hebrew? I see the second word as Resh.
RESH is the 20th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has a numerical value of 200. RESH makes a sound like the R in Radiant. Resh means BEGINNING or HEAD. When one spells out the letter Resh in Hebrew, it is Resh Yud Shin. Yud and Shin spell YESH - THERE IS. The letter Resh means BEGINNING. So it is possible to say that the Resh literally means THERE IS A BEGINNING.
Swedish/Norwegian translator here, and that is definitely English. The lowercase 't’s are connected to the preceding letters in an odd way, but it says “At Rest”. The crossbar of the first ‘t’ seems worn away on one side but the second ‘t’ has a fully visible crossbar.
Are there any marks that would indicate the manufacturer? Can you take pictures of all sides? Rubbings? My point here is to see if we can determine where it came from so that we can get a definitive answer on what it says.
