Mysterious Note
Of the past 36 hours, I've just spent 20 of them working on an assignment. Thirteen and a half of those hours were in the university library. I'd carved out quite a little den for myself. I was at a computer desk, surrounded by piles of books (at times I felt like I was in a fort), a bottle of orange juice (or cup of coffee) nearby. I'd be lounging with my shoes off (one needs to get comfortable), my fingers slowly drifting over the keys as I tried to make sense of the data before me.
The assignment was on English grammar, which admittedly isn't my favourite subject. It was in the form of three "short essay answers". There was no guideline as to length - I ended up with 14 pages (over 4,000 words), which I thought was more than enough. I suppose time will tell.
In the course of my research for the assignment, I was browsing through Bennet's Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions and I found this piece of paper. It looks like a note that's been used as a bookmark. (Click the image to see a larger version.)
When I first saw it, and pulled it out to read it, I turned it upside down so I could read it, thinking for a brief second that it may be Greek. I quickly realised that this was not the case, and turned it around again, noticing that I could read some English words - ambiguous, vague, but most of everything else was very scrawly. It was at this point that I noticed that the 1, 2, and 3 of the list were on the right, not the left. A couple of the letterforms reminded me of something. And then it clicked - is this Hebrew?
I know very little of the Hebrew script, and even less of Hebrew itself, but it seems a reasonable reckoning. A little bit of internet searching for examples of handwritten Hebrew yield similar results.
The fluency of the handwriting makes me think it's a native speaker. Also, the English words that are there are written in a well-formed cursive script - a common feature of those who learn English as a second language. But here's the question - what does it actually say? Anyone know? Comments appreciated.
Bennett, D. C. (1975). Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions - An essay in stratificational semantics. London: Longman.
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Hebrew it may be, but it's all Greek to me! haha! (sorry)
that's creepy... this reminds me of this time that i got a brand new pad of paper from a shop and it had a message scrawled on the first page..
this was back in my old paranoia days... when i thought i was being watched.. i still think i'm being watched, but now i just don't care :P
how can it be greek you BIMBO, its written from right to left, and greek is from left to right.
anyhow, it says:
BENNET:
Introduction: decrease the amount of SENSES by:
-dividing between VAGUE and AMBIGUOUS
-if it is neutral relatively to time/place, as in IN.
- define the meaning of PREP on it's own in such a way that the meaning of the context will be added to it anyway.
Part A:
*yawn* and i got superexcited that it would be something awesome.
Since when could Lua read Hebrew but not Arabic?
And only for a split second did I think it was Greek. I did turn it upside down to read it (making it left-to-right like Greek). Maybe I was just thinking about you too much, bombo!