Translation Assistance on Indian Sword. Urdu? Arabic? Hindi?

[RSWORD]

I am looking for translation assistance for the inscription on the spine of this Indian sword. I'm hoping it gives some insight into the ceremonial or religious application the sword most likely held. I'm not sure of the language though but am hoping someone is able to translate. Many thanks in advance.

[BBJW]

It might be Devanagari also called Nagari script and read from left to right?--bbjw

[RSWORD]

Yes, I agree. Devanagari is definitely a possibility. Does anyone know somebody that can translate Devanagari?

[RSWORD]

Bumping up in the hopes of translation assistance. Thanks.

[Nihl]

Ok so.... I'm not exactly fully fluent in any devanagari-based languages, however I can transliterate them! I feel like the language on this sword is indeed sanskrit, or something quite close to it. One thing that's worth noting is this inscription has a really odd number of straight vertical lines in it, which rather throws a wrench in things. In devanagari, the symbol used for a period (.) is a straight line, known as a danda (।). According to Wikipedia, there is also such a thing as a double-danda, which is used to indicate the end of a full (religious) verse. Though there are a couple parts of the inscription that might have a double danda in them, which would certainly reduce the amount of excess lines there are, it's really hard to tell whether these lines are in fact danda, "aa" diacritics (which I'll explain next), or something else entirely (possibly related to the dialect this inscription was written in).

About the aforementioned "aa" diacritic - in devanagari the character for a long open "aa" sound (pronounced like "ah") is "आ". However, when combined with consonant characters, the long aa (आ) gets shortened to just a thin T-shape " ा", with the circle before the character representing where a consonant character should go. For example, this is roughly the character for k: क, and so to write "kaa" would be "का". This all becomes relevant to reading the inscription as you would be surprised to know that the top bar that is rather iconic of devanagari is actually often forgone in old or informal inscriptions. Thus "ा " or our example of "का" will actually become roughly "|" (I'm using this character as a stand in for a barless ा) and "क |". This is why interpreting each vertical line is a challenge, as a barless aa and a danda mark are effectively interchangeable without any further context.

One issue with transliterating this inscription is that it uses a character I've never seen before - something that looks roughly like a deformed lowercase h - which I've attached a separate image of. I have no clue what this character would be for, so my closest guess is that it's some sort of variation of an "n" character - न - which you will notice has a small downwards protrusion. I'm hoping that, in the case of this inscription, that small protrusion has been exaggerated as a large swoosh. Outside of such stylizations, however, I am at a complete loss and unable to transliterate such a character.

Finally, before I provide the transliteration, it is important to know that when reading sanskrit, given that it is an abugida, each singular consonant character is assumed to have a short "a" sound (roughly similar to "uh") after it. So, in other words, without an extra vowel symbol, the letter k (क) is actually pronounced "ka", and is not just the k sound by itself.

In the main image below, I've written out by hand all of the characters in the inscription, followed by two typed out versions of each segment. These typed segments follow the closest characters I was able to discern from the images, with each variation switching between interpreting the vertical lines as danda marks and aa diacritics.

In the interest of not making this transliteration more convoluted than it already is, below I'll more or less combine each variation into a single sentence, followed by a phonetic transliteration in english/latin script, and then a short commentary as necessary. After all this, at the very bottom of my post, I'll include the full "verse" with transliteration.

1: का ता ग फ ना ला न
"kaa taa ga pha naa laa na"
The character I interpreted as g (ग) is, once again, simply an assumption I'm making based on the fact that both characters feature protrusions in similar spots. I also mistakenly wrote the फ and ग characters the wrong way around on the image. Oops.

2:ल त दा पा घा ला फ
"la ta daa paa ghaa la pha"
The main issue here is that the character for gh (घ) is written on the sword in such a way it could actually be gh or dh - घ or ध - two characters that are quite similar. Because, however, the top of the character shown on the blade connects to the vertical line, I'm choosing to interpret it as gh.

3:ज टा।। प्पा रा स ल्ल
"ja taa. ppaa raa sa lla"
This segment is where it gets really weird. Basically what is probably a "t" is followed by no less than four vertical lines. I have truthfully no clue how to interpret this, so I decided to ignore one of those lines in favor of turning the rest into a diacritic and a double danda - without which I feel this would be a run-on sentence . As with the previous segment, parts of the inscription here look quite similar, in this case with what might be रा and स, so I've really just arbitrarily decided between them.

4:ना ता रा। पा ना ला ना व।।
"naa taa raa, paa naa laa naa va."
The bit in the middle (रा।) here is mostly just guesswork. In the image it looks more like "/||", so once again, I arbitrarily decided it might as well be रा।. At the end, I didn't notice until now that there are actually two additional vertical marks past the v (व), so I figured that would probably work as a double danda.

All together: का ता ग फ ना ला न ल त दा पा घा ला फ ज टा।। प्पा रा स ल्ल ना ता रा। पा ना ला ना व।।
"kaa taa ga pha naa laa na la ta daa paa ghaa la pha ja taa. ppaa raa sa lla naa taa raa, paa naa laa naa va."

My guess as to what the actual meaning of it all is is indeed that it is spiritual in some form. I believe I've read before that in Hinduism these kinds of chants/mantras composed of monosyllabic words/morphemes are actually rather common devotional things.
I suppose that was a lot of work just to end up at the conclusion that it's basically "ceremonial", but I enjoy contributing to these things when I can .

[RSWORD]

Nihl,

Thank you for taking as much time as you did to provide a very thorough and most helpful response. The images, your explanations and detailed transliteration has provided much more detail than what was known previously.