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Comment by mataug | Hacker News Reader

Theres ambiguous separation between the words on the picture.

It reads phonetically as "MugayatheenPak Udaya Kappal Mani". The translation is spot on.

Source: I'm a native speaker from Tamil Nadu.

True even the old inscription (on the bell) is pretty easy to read, compared to some of the old stuff you find in temples in Madurai / Tirupati.

If I remember correctly the inscriptions in Madurai or other temples around South India are in the Grantham Language which is why its much harder for us modern Tamil speakers to read.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantha_alphabet

>Grantham

Wow, first time I've heard of it. Read some of the article. Seems like Malayalam, Sinhalese and one or two other languages are derived from Grantha, and Tamil is a sister language of it.

Also interesting is that the article says that at some period, some documents were written in a mixture of Sanskrit and Grantha, sometimes mixing them even in the same word(!)

Edit: IIRC, I also first got to know about the Modi script via some earlier thread on HN:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modi_alphabet

So am I. I was surprised when it said some of the characters were in Old/Archaic Tamil but I could read the characters fairly clearly.

Also, I noticed the actual inscription on top is pronouncing something else that i cannot understand. Only the bottom inscription (translation) is comprehensible for me. I think the bell has only the top section sentence inscribed in it. Can you comprehend the top one?

I thought the top one simply has a slightly different writing style.(For ex: the thi in muhaiyatheen).. Apart from that there does seem some grammar/or other rule/mistake.. I can see 'udaiya' (or something lke it) twice. once joined with 'buks' and once before bell... Which is unusual, and makes me wonder if it was written by someone not familiar with the language..

Check that.. .After going through that grantha script(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantha_alphabet#/media/File:G...) someone posted here.. I think the 'thi' difference can be from grantha script influence... But that 'udaiya' repeated for both name and ship is very interesting...almost like trying to be very explicit...

Hey scriptdevil ! We've met before remember ? We both share a common name right ? Don't worry I won't dox you on HN

What is "MugayatheenPak"?

"Muhayideen Bak" i.e., the person who owned the ship from which the bell came.

Is Muhayideen related to the Arabic word "mujahideen" or is it just a coincidence that they look kind of similar?

They're quite different.

Ud-deen means of the religion. So, there are many names like Tajuddeen (crown of the religion), Shamsuddeen (Sun of the religion) and in this case, Muhiyyudeen (vivifier? of religion).

Mujahid is a person is a person who engages in jihad. The plural is Mujahideen (which is quite different when written in arabic but dramatically similar when transliterated into english). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mujahid

bold hypothesis: The bell was used as alarm for attacks of warriors, next to a bell for tsunami, storm, etc ... and a tsunami took the bells to the ocean. Very unlikely though that Arabic name would be used when the temple or whatever tried to resist the cultural invasion.

I wonder, what means Bak? Big?

Many words in places influenced by Arabic (or other Semitic languages) take similar forms, in this case mu_a_i_d (een is plural). Arabic has a triliteral root system and this form is a way of structuring a root to indicate the person who does the thing the root refers to. I don't know if Tamil was influenced by Arabic; in this case it could be an utter coincidence.

It could be also there is word محيي الدين spells like "Muhyeeddeen" roughly means person who celebrates, enlightens religion.

I think it is a name .(and probably common).

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