Monday, May 11, 2020
Anybody know anything about Nepali script?
Looking at an old kukri, and it has this marking on the spine
Information I could find says it's about what regiment it was made for/issued to, but that's about it. Ran across a chart of the alphabet, but I couldn't make anything of it except the last two characters each meaning '4'.
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3 comments:
It's hard separate "signal" from noise... I think the first two characters (circle-line, linked-line) are "vee". The next character (three-with-a-diagonal) is the digit 3.
The fourth character appears to be a "ch" and the next character is either a "r-half-ch" or a "r-dh". I can't tell what the long-U-shaped-dash is but the next character is clearly "s" (<-|). I can't tell if there's a vertical line (which would be "aa") next or if that's the edge of the die / stamp. The next character is pretty clearly "r" (<) and again either an "aa" or die / stamp edge.
The last character before the 44 (backwards-three) is likely a six. The vertical line (when not linked with another character) is used as a period in Devanagiri (the script that Nepali and northern Indian languages share) or it may be a slash.
Are you sure this comes from Nepal and not India? The "sr" (pronounced "sar") means "head" in Hindi but (at least as far as Google Translate knows) nothing in Nepali.
Said to be from Nepal. According to some digging around this type of marking is virtually always from there.
The other thing I repeatedly read was 'Trying to properly translate these markings drives collectors up the wall.'
It is Nepalese northern devanagari script stamped into the spine of the blade, which translates as “Thrice honored Chandra”, an honorific reference to Prime Minister Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana who ruled Nepal from 1901-1929, followed by a two character abbreviation of a Gurkha battalion name, followed by the inventory number of the knife.
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