What does this Arabic inscription say?

January 24, 2010 6:44 PM

ArabicFilter: What does the inscription on the bottom of my peppermill say?

I shot a quick video of it and posted it here. For all I know it says "ACME PEPPERMILL WORKS LTD", but inquiring minds and all that. We bought it via eBay several years ago...if memory serves, the seller was a dealer in all sorts of things from in and around Turkey.

posted by jquinby to Writing & Language (7 answers total)

Are you sure that's Arabic? If you got it in Turkey it could just be Turkish in the old Arabic alphabet instead of the modern one. Not that I know either of those languages...
posted by k. at 7:39 PM on January 24, 2010

Mr. Jbenben (who is Egyptian and writes and speaks Arabic, French, and English) says it must be Persian - or gibberish/symbols.

Persian uses the same characters - but in different ways. Kinda like French and English use the same alphabet - but different.

Good Luck.
posted by jbenben at 8:05 PM on January 24, 2010

My boyfriend who speaks, writes, and reads Farsi (Persian) says it's definitely Arabic and that it's probably a line from the Koran since it mentions Allah several times.
posted by phunniemee at 8:09 PM on January 24, 2010

I read Arabic, not Farsi, but it does indeed mention Allah, but parts of it just look like gibberish -- letters that aren't connected that should be, and vice versa.
posted by proj at 5:35 AM on January 25, 2010

Hey, a correction for above: "...definitely not Farsi and that it's probably an Arabic line from the Koran since it mentions Allah several times."
posted by phunniemee at 8:33 AM on January 25, 2010

Response by poster: Interesting. Any chance it's food-related proverb? Quick searches of the Quran for 'pepper' or 'spice' didn't turn up much, though 'food' turns up quite a few things.
posted by jquinby at 8:44 AM on January 25, 2010

Though it looks close, it's definitely not the Arabic language. There are letters in there that do not exist in Arabic, the words that look like Allah are incomplete - they are missing the 'H' in the end that is not how it's written in Arabic. Since it's from Turkey, it may be Ottoman Turkish or some other central asian language written in Arabic script, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet for other possible options.
posted by xufasch at 12:45 PM on January 25, 2010