Relevant enough... my brother was visiting me here in SF and found a message in a bottle, but we can't even identify the language. Some people have suggested Mongolian. Here's a high-res picture: http://andrewbadr.com/files/tmp/bottle.jpg
It was in a bottle of cheap California wine, so we figure they probably threw it from here. It's still fun though. Anyone out there who can read Mongolian?
I wrote about your message on my blog, and a commenter there, a linguist who knows Mongolian, confirmed it's Mongolian and translated it. His translation is in Russian (as is my blog), so I can only offer it to you re-translated yet again into English :)
"The first page says something like:
make 3 of my wishes come true
1. to go to New York and spend one wonderful year there
2. to all my relatives - good health, peace, success and something I can't make out :)
3. something about spending a good life with my beloved
the second page:
I would like to meet my true love, become famous throughout the world, and live a good live with my family."
It seems like the two pages were written by different people.
It's Cyrillic and this is the language of Kazakstan. It's very funny because it says he/she congratulates holy holiday of Muslims, Eid ul-Fitr (wiki it) and it is maximum a week old because it is now holiday of Eid ul-Fitr. I am not kazakh, I couldn't read & understand it fully. It says, he is from NYC, he wishes all the bests and so on...
Thank you! Time to find a Kazakh speaker. The bottle was found on October 21st (more than a week ago) by the way, so we'll need a full translation to see what exactly is going on. You've been a great help.
I am a Bulgarian from Turkish descent. Cyrillic is the first alphabet I have learned, and this certainly contains words that do sound articulate when read "in Cyrillic". But it also contains letters that don't exist in Cyrillic. For example, at the second line of the "top" side of the message, I can with almost certainty say that this is a "w". A letter that doesn't exist in Cyrillic (and can't imagine some of the Cyrillic letters being written like that)
I can't read all of the message (because as is common with written text, you often need to know the language in order to be able to "make up" some of the letters), but I can certainly read maybe like 50% of it.
Mongolians do use Cyrillic. I have no knowledge of Mongolian.
But I will bring another suspicion to the table. I wouldn't exclude Turkic (and other) languages from within Russia (and the former USSR). Those peoples all (or most of them) know Russian (Cyrillic) and often use the alphabet to write their own languages. I can certainly identify Turkic (sounding) words like "сайхан"-sayhan(Seyhan), "амед"-amed(Ahmed) - which do sound like very common Turkish names.
Of course all of this is pure speculation from my side. It could very well be Mongolian. If it were in some Turkic language, I would expect to be able to make up the meaning of some parts, because of my knowledge of Turkish (which I can't).
I think Mongolian often uses a Cyrillic alphabet, and that doesn't look particularly Cyrillic to me, just smudgy and hard to read (but the latin alphabet).
It's definitely Cyrillic, and definitely Mongolian. The beginning of the third line on the second page reads хуссэн бухнээ, and googling finds this phrase on Mongolian pages. No idea what any of that means, though.
It is NOT mongolian. In mongolian there are no letters Ә, Ғ, Қ ... This is kazakhish. I am from Germany but have roots from Azerbaijan, therefore I understand altaic-turcis languages. It looks similar to mongolian but it isn't.
Definitely Greek. I'm teaching myself koine Greek right now, and easily recognize the alphabet. Unfortunately, I don't know it well enough to even attempt a translation right now, but if you bump into someone Greek, you might be able to get a translation
It was in a bottle of cheap California wine, so we figure they probably threw it from here. It's still fun though. Anyone out there who can read Mongolian?