My father bought this plate in the Middle East sometime in the 1940s. Aside from translating it, can anybody tell me what the plate represents, or anything else about it?
Now that I know it’s Arabic, maybe I can figure it out myself. :smack:
It’s firstly, not Arabic from what I can tell. I think the second word is sitarey which means “stars”, although I may be wrong. This is for the central calligraphy.
Turkish or Farsi would be my guess.
I take the blame. I reported that the post might get more attention if it had ‘Arabic translation’ in it. I assumed, based on that it was from the Middle East.
That’s OK, you done good. 
To the best of my knowledge, my father has never been to Turkey or Iran. That doesn’t negate the possibility of it being either language, but suggests that it isn’t. I dunno—it sure looks ‘Arabicky’ to me, judging from what I can see on wiki. And I know for a fact that he has been to Egypt.
You posted the image upside down.
It is Arabic, probably Egyptian. The text is intended to express welcome and hospitality to a guest. The first word in the center is تفضّل tafaḍḍal ‘Please’. Please be so kind as to… I’m still working on trying to read the word after that, what the guest is being invited to do. It clearly has the letter د (d) or possibly ذ (dh) in it, and the end of the word is ي (y or ī). The other letters are difficult to tell, because the dots determine what the letters are, but in this style of fancy calligraphy the dots are often displaced well away from the letters they’re supposed to go with. Some combination of b or t or n or y or something.
The words around the edge say things like ساهر sāhir ‘one who stays up at night socializing’, بالسلامة bil-salāmah ‘in safety’, بصدق bi-ṣidq ‘in truth’, بالتسليم bil-taslīm ‘in greeting’, حلاوى *ḥalāwá *‘sweets’, etc. All on the theme of hospitality. The plate is the sort of dish that Arabs serve sweets & pastries on, for guests. There’s more text, but it’s hard to read because of the fancy calligraphy as mentioned above, the words twisted out of shape and the dots displaced from the letters they go with. But this should be enough to give the general idea.
Yes, it is upside down, but I cannot agree with Johanna about the central calligraphy. We clearly have the “ye” written in the Persian/Urdu form (in Urdu there are two types of “ye” this is called bari ye) which tends to mean not Arabic.
Is it really upside down? I thought so at first, based on the script at the top, but wouldn’t it appear “upside down” even flipped?
It’s stylized Arabic script which is often hard to read.
May I piggyback a question?
I have a collection of Svea stoves, mostly 123s, plus a Primus or two. One of them is a Svea 1 kerosene stove, like this one. I’ve never been able to get a photo of the script on it, but the second photo on the linked page shows most of it. Here’s another photo I’ve just found. Can someone translate it for me?
Only words I can make out is the last one on the bottom is “Muzmoon”, which means essay or thesis. The first one seems to be Sanaullah, which is a name, but I cannot be sure. Got a picture sans glare?
Not finding much. I found this photo that shows part of it.
I’ve just googled svea+stove+translation and found this:
I know nothing of Turkish, nor Arabic writing. This guy seems to be saying that a phrase in the Turkish language was written using Arabic script, much as an English speaker might use the Roman characters to spell ‘Ohayō’ (Good morning) instead of using the Japanese characters おはよう。If he is correct, ‘Look for Svea brand among stoves’ would be a reasonable thing for them to put on their product.
Incorrect. They use it in Arabic calligraphy too. Unlike in Urdu, it doesn’t represent a different phoneme; it’s just a variant shape of the same letter yā’. It was used in Arabic calligraphy as a decorative variant shape of the letter before Urdu repurposed it because of needing a new letter to write the vowel /eː/ which didn’t exist in Arabic.
The stove says, in Arabic,
سڤيا الأصلي مضمون
Sviyā al-aṣlī maḍmūn
translation:
‘Guaranteed genuine Svea’
The letter fā’ written with 3 dots instead of 1 is an adaptation for writing foreign words with the sound of /v/ which doesn’t exist in Arabic. I can’t read the line above it because it’s obscured by the shadow across it, but it looks like it might be Ottoman Turkish text; it’s in a different style of Arabic script.
As for the claim that the Turkish language didn’t change when the script was changed from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet, that’s wrong too. As part of Atatürk’s program to de-Ottomanize Turkey, the Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Association) carried out a thorough overhaul of the language, deleting half of the old words and finding new words to replace them, and purging the language of Arabic and Persian grammatical forms. So even when Ottoman text is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, it’s nearly incomprehensible for modern Turks. I have a facsimile edition of Piri Reis’s book with the Ottoman text transliterated into the Latin alphabet, and alongside that is a *translation *of it into modern Turkish. The two are as different as modern English and Chaucer.
Thank you, Johanna. I’ve been wondering about that for years!
Well, I guess it did not say Ash nazg durbatulûk. . . ?
Well, thank goodness for that. We sure don’t need that kind of stuff around here!
Wow. Thanks ignorance fought. When did they stop using it in written Arabic, since here the presence of a “Bari yeh” (and a “gaf” and “pay”) are usually make it clear that it is the Perso script not the Arabic one?
To clarify, Turkish used to be written using (a variant of) the Arabic alphabet. In the 1920s, Atatürk decided to switch over to using the Latin alphabet, to distance the country from its Ottoman past and strengthen links with Europe.
It was never a thing in Arabic, really, just a variant shape sometimes used in calligraphy. It was never seen as a different letter in any way. Being skinny and linear it fits better into some spaces than the round form is all, I guess. Eventually, whoever figured out Urdu orthography seized on it because a new letter was needed for a non-Arabic vowel phoneme, and it must have seemed handy. Then it became a thing.