Shorthand writing on old photo?

[Greensleeves]

Gosh Maggie, that certainly looks very similar!  Maybe you are onto something there.

[Maggie.]

The difficulty is I don't know how Urdu 'works' - could each separate group of marks that we see on the back of the photo be made up of combinations of strokes representing different letters?  Explaining it rather badly I fear.

Maggie

[Erato]

I wonder if it was a code or shorthand picked up from some literary source, say a popular mystery novel of the day.  And look at this sample from Dickens:

http://blog.themorgan.org/a-letter-from-charles-dickens.aspx

[youngtug]

Urdu has dots and squiggles, but the dots seem to be grouped together rather than randomly placed as on the photo.  And the date of the photo predates the arrival of Urdu in the UK.  Of course it could have been added later.

I think that Urdu would have been present in the UK a long time before the photo was taken.My grandfather served in India and could speak [some] Urdu, and another person in the village in England that he lived in could also. This person could probably read and write it, although I am not certain but he did translate several Sanscrit texts. Apart from this example I am sure that the knowledge of Urdu would have been here for a good while previous.

[msr]

Maureen, do you know of countries visited, parents posted abroad?  Maybe someone wrote it when abroad.

Thaana script from  http://www.omniglot.com/writing/thaana.htm  has squiggles and dots.

Perhaps code used in WWII?

Won't go as far as to suggest Klingon but it's very intriguing. 

[Maggie.]

Of course you are quite correct YT, although the presence of the Urdu script would not have been as familiar to people in the 1950s as it has increasingly become in the UK since that time.

That's an interesting link to Dickens's shorthand Erato. A challenge to decipher it.

[Gaie]

This is driving me nuts, so I've e-mailed SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the London University, to see if they can help.

KR
Gaie

[Greensleeves]

Useful contacts there Gaie.  I suppose if they don't recognise it, we're back to some form of shorthand again.  By a process of elimination, sooner or later, we might get it.

[sami]

Perhaps someone from the Armed Forces - World War 2 board would have an idea on this.

There have been so many interesting theories on this it will be interesting to find an answer. That said, has the image been tried on the Armed Forces board yet?