13 Comments on “Another unknown language”

  1. Thanks to a website for razors collectors, we found out that the mysterious language is probably just the brand of the razor, “Wade & Butcher”, written in English but with a great effort so that the characters should somehow look Chinese.

  2. It doesn’t look like Wade & Butcher to me and why would someone go to great length to engrave something on the blade that is already imprinted on the knife by the manufacturer?

    I’m not sure how to interpret the characters yet. They don’t have the shape and flow of most Asian scripts, and it’s not consistent with scripts from the Mediterranean area. Even the slight Runish shapes aren’t consistent, and there’s an odd mix of straights and curves that looks more home-grown than anything.

    My guess, for now (until there’s more time to study it), is that it’s an embellished or encoded rendition of the owner’s name.

  3. Another possibility, if it’s not the owner’s name (or the name of an organization to which s/he belonged) is that it’s an incantation encoded or stylized in a ritualistic manner.

  4. its difficult to say anything about it. anyway how old the knife is & from where it was collected?

  5. If the origin of the knife is southern China/northern Burma/northern Thailand then there are several possibilities. The Lisu, Lolo, and Yi languages have scripts which look vaguely like the example on the knife. Consult Bernard Comrie’s “Languages of China” or David Diringer’s “The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind” for more details. Both should be available at university libraries. Good luck!

  6. It’s a very old straight razor used for shaving made by the company Wade and Butcher. They would literally make up Chinese characters to imprint on some of their blades when goods from the orient were exotic and in high demand. We might as well call them pseudo-Nordic runes or “Wicca Pigeon’ but they fit no actual pattern of language. The knife is WB, the language is made up. I think it says, “Bacon” but that is the keystone of Linear-B for me too so…

  7. it’s Korean but I cannot translate ( I can recognize the letters’symbols …you can compare on an alphabetical table of Hangul language = Korean)

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