# Unknown Language: Seb utre mem dietah ule utre mut'su sutan



## Jordan700

Hello everyone, I'm Jordan. Over the past weekend the museum I work for was broken into, and the donation box was taken. The alarm did not sound, and no door or window was broken. The only difference besides the missing cash box was the odd message left on the white board. I have searched the net, but I have found no language that matches. So now I am here hoping that one of you will be able to translate it. There were no accent marks but there were ' between some of the letters. Here is a copy of the message as it was written. Thank you for your help.

Seb utre mem dietah ule utre mut'su sutan. Shen a'igie mem taga ra'aot met tahiridi sard'ere met shen utra gobek nahk tahi femn'a. Shen a'fa'utra solaire sere daimi'a. Shen a'phacuntsatra tiska'a met ili'a suf sere sutan daim'a. Shen tiba'bis pi'nah netrib met tuss.


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## Ander

An invented language in my opinion.


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## Jordan700

Thanks for the tip. So do you think its a language at all, or some sort of code? The museum has reason to think that the theif was our painter, who had spent most of her college years in Africa. Could this be an odd African lanfguage? Thanks again!


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## robbie_SWE

If it's not an invented language, then it must be written phonetically (would explain why you haven’t found it on the Internet). My best guess would be that it was originally written in another alphabet. I can make out the word "_solaire_" (French, meaning *sun*). It brought me to think of the Berber language for some reason, but I'm probably totally off course.

Hope somebody else can clear things up!

 robbie


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## Dawei

Do you live in any of the states in red here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Uto-Aztecan_langs.png

A bunch of the words matched or were close to the examples of these languages given on the Spanish Wikipedia article for Uto-Azteca languages, here: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenguas_uto-aztecas


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## michimz

I would go with African, and not Uto-Aztecan, but the only thing that I am basing that on is that it "sounds" African, and not Uto-Aztecan.  I am quite familiar with Nahuatl, and I can rule that one out, but as for the others I can say nothing.  I think the word _soleire_  might even support this being an African language because of the heavy presence of French in Africa.  

Michimz


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## divisortheory

Any idea where in Africa this person spent their college years? Even a general region might help to identify what family of languages it comes from

Edit: An image of the text might help as well.  I was noticing that it has a lot of properties in common with Hausa, and even sort of sounds the same.


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## divisortheory

This is going to sound weird, and I'm just throwing this out there.  But I noticed the word "shen" was used very often in this passage, particularly at the beginning of sentences.  So I figured it must be something very common.  Adding this to my google arsenal, I almost immediately came across a language called Tsolyáni, a fictitious language created for some kind of role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons.  Much to my surprise, Tsolyáni not only was derived from Urdu, Pashto, and Mayan, but one of the members of the alphabet is actually an apostrophe that can appear multiple times in the same word, much like the above passage.

Check out the following word list.
http://www.weirdrealm.com/tekumel/tsolyani.dat


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## Jordan700

Thank you all for your help! I have no idea what part of Africa she was in, but I will try to find out. I live in California. I can't post a picture until I have posted over 30 time. Maybe someone could post it for me if I gave them a URL? Send me a PM if your willing to help out. Thank you all again, I will keep searching!


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## Whodunit

Jordan700 said:


> Thank you all for your help! I have no idea what part of Africa she was in, but I will try to find out. I live in California. I can't post a picture until I have posted over 30 time. Maybe someone could post it for me if I gave them a URL? Send me a PM if your willing to help out. Thank you all again, I will keep searching!



I agreed to upload the picture for him, since I'm also very much interested in the message.


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## Ander

divisortheory said:


> This is going to sound weird, and I'm just throwing this out there.  But I noticed the word "shen" was used very often in this passage, particularly at the beginning of sentences.  So I figured it must be something very common.  Adding this to my google arsenal, I almost immediately came across a language called Tsolyáni, a fictitious language created for some kind of role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons.  Much to my surprise, Tsolyáni not only was derived from Urdu, Pashto, and Mayan, but one of the members of the alphabet is actually an apostrophe that can appear multiple times in the same word, much like the above passage.
> 
> Check out the following word list.
> http://www.weirdrealm.com/tekumel/tsolyani.dat



Jordan did not tell us in his first post that the words "cave" and "dragons" appear in the picture of the message.


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## Jordan700

Cave and Dragons was written by the docents as a to do list. It had nothing to do with the message. Sorry for the mistake.


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## divisortheory

I'm leaning towards this Tsolyani language personally, only because the apostrophes are so out of place and don't make sense. Unfortunately there's no online reference for Tsolyani.  The only one I found was in ebook format, but cost a few dollars.


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