Here’s a chunk of cryptic text that looks like Latin at first glance, early Latin, in a 13th-century script. To read it, you need to remember a few things about old-style script…

In the early medieval period, they wrote letters differently…

• “a” was written like two cees joined—”cc”,
• “t” was small and round like a “c”,
• “e” was sometimes written without a crossbar, and sometimes with a longer embellished crossbar,
• the stem of the “i” sometimes had a slight curve, similar to the rounded “t”,
• a common style of “r” had a long foot on the bottom (it almost looks like a square cee), and
• roman numerals with several ones in a row or words with two “i” chars at the end, usually added a descending tail to the last one so it looks like a “j”.

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here’s the cryptic text with a rough transliteration:

The transliteration doesn’t have to be perfect to demonstrate that there’s something a bit weird about this text.

What language is it? It looks vaguely like early medieval Latin, but the common words aren’t there, and it’s somewhat more repetitive than one would expect.

Is it another language expressed with Latin characters?

I’ll let you think about it before I provide further information.

J.K. Petersen

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