The Voynich Ninja

I now have a (Judaeo-)Greek reading of the 3rd line of the passage at the top of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1. I present it here together with the first two lines.

Again, in my rendition of the quasi-Judaeo-Greek text below, I am going to use the transcription "A" to stand for a letter that could have been represented in a Judaeo-Greek text by the Hebrew letter "aleph". As I noted in my post about the historical text earlier, when Greek was written in the Hebrew script, the Hebrew letter aleph could be a placeholder letter under which a rather wide variety of vowel diacritic dots could be written, but the diacritics were not written in this ms. Thus in this place there could often occur Greek alpha, but also omicron or epsilon or upsilon. I do not use this symbol anywhere near that freely in my interpretation below, but I do use it in some places.

first three lines of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1 in the Voynich ms text:

[t]eeodaiin  shey  epairody  osaiin  yteeoey  shey  epaiin  oaiin
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]daiir  okeody  qoekeeg  sar  oeteody  oteey  keey  key  keeodal[/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ycheo  s oeeg  cheos aiin  okesoe  aram  shees  dalaiin  dam[/font][/font]

my Judaeo-Greek interpretation of this text:

[]ei[A]pan  tis  ipeirous  otan  skiiAis  tis  ,  epan  oAn
par'  Atous  &Atees  tAr(a)  oikous  o(u)k-eis(i)  tees  ,  tis  t-ei[A]pAs
shio  t-Aees  heAt-an  Atitoi  AlAs  ,  deit  vasAn  ,  fAs

Now "normalizing" this Judaeo-Greek text into a more standard Greek form:

eipan  tis  ipeirous  otan  skiais  tis  ,  eipan  oun
para  autous  &  autes  tora  oikous  ouk  eisi  tes  ,  tis  t'-eipes
sou  tes  etan  auttoi  aules  ,  deite [te] vasein  ,  phes

Very literal word-for-word English translation in the same word order as the Greek:

"they said the continents when in the shadows , they said then"
"beside them (masc. & fem.) now [astrol.] houses not are they , to them it-you said"
"to you they were these houses/courts , you see the foundation, you say/assert"

Idiomatic English translation:

"They said when the continents are in the shadows, then they said
now there are not (astrological?) houses by them, you said to them
these houses/courts belonged to you , you see the foundation, you claim"

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Comments: As I pointed out in my post about historical Judaeo-Greek, some ambiguity in the representation of Greek vowels is inevitable in such a script. Neither Hebrew nor Voynichese can possibly render all the Greek vowels as precisely as the Greek script itself does.

First of all, I have fixed the end of the 2nd line: since I am finding more and more evidence that Voynich [l] is more likely to be Greek "s" than Greek "n", I now read the last two words of this line as "tis t'-eipes", meaning "to them you said it". It is common in Greek, as in other Balkan languages (the "Balkan Sprachbund"), to use a pre-verbal clitic object pronoun. This explains the "t'-" (short for "to") prefixed to "-eipes" ("you said"). Thus I do not have to explain away the gallows letter here as a pilcrow-like glyph strangely placed in the middle of a paragraph.

Further, I now have a *consistent* use of the form "tis" as a dative plural pronoun/article in two different phrases in the first two lines: "skiais tis" meaning "in the shadows", and "tis" here meaning "to them". The Ancient Greek dative plural form was masc/neut "tois", fem "tais", but Modern Greek just has an accusative plural (feminine) form "tis" or "tes". In this ms text we see the author trying to use the classical dative plural, but using the more modern form "tis" to do so.

This identification of "tis" as the dative plural pronoun/article, consistent with the historical change from Ancient to Modern Greek, but distinct from both, may be the most significant grammatical feature of Voynich Judaeo-Greek that I have identified so far. If I am able to interpret the entire ms in this way, I hope that I can produce an accompanying work on "The Grammar of Voynich Judaeo-Greek" to explain as many such forms as possible.

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About the third line in general: I rather like the poetic flow of the Greek in this line in its final form:

"sou  tes  etan  auttoi  aules,  deite  vasein,  phes"

One can even hear the meter:

"sóu tes étan áuttoi áules, déite vásein, phés"

The grammatically consistent phrase and clause breaks, after "aules" and after "vasein", even fit with the poetic meter of the line.

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More detailed comments about the individual words:

The phonetic spelling of "sou" as "shio[u]" is consistent with modern pronunciation of Greek, which late medieval Byzantine Greek resembled much more than Ancient or Koine. If you hear for example the basic modern Greek greeting "geia sou" ("hello"), it sounds more like "yeia shou". There is no *phonemic* distinction of [s] and [sh] in Greek, but there is variation in the pronunciation of the phoneme /s/. For a Judaeo-Greek writer, who was familiar with Hebrew in which there is a distinction between /s/ and /sh/, it would have been natural to write Greek "s" as Judaeo-Greek "sh" in many such cases.

The Voynich vords [s oeeg] are somewhat difficult to read on the ms page, but the most natural Greek interpretation "t-Aees" = "tes" fits very well with both the meaning of the line, the grammar of the line, and even the poetic meter of the line. "tes" simply means "they". 

The [ch] at the beginning of [cheos aiin] is natural, because many stages and dialects of Greek have naturally added an "h-" "breathing" sound at the beginning of words that are written with an initial vowel. So here we find written "heAt-an" for phonetic [hetan], which is more recognizable as the Greek word "etan", the basic verb form "they were".

The next word [okesoe] I read as Judaeo-Greek "Atitoi", representing Greek "aut(i)toi" or just "auttoi" or "autoi". It is possible that this form is some kind of compound of "aute(s)-" ("these") and "-oi" ("the" plural).

The next word [aram] is the heart of the whole line, like "oikous" in the line above it. I read it as Judaeo-Greek "AlAs", representing Greek "aules", meaning "houses, courtyards, courts" (as in the court of a kingdom). It could also mean the "courtiers" of a monarch.

Thus we now have a very grammatical sequence in this line: "sou tes etan autoi aules", as long as we understand that "autoi" is not a classical form but rather a compound like "aute(s)-oi". It is also possible that the author simply confused the grammatical genders of some nouns in this ms text. This is not unheard of in Byzantine Greek: Even in probably the most famous Byzantine Greek epic poetic work, Digenis Akritis (also transliterated as Digenes Akritas, which only proves my point about the ambiguous vowel qualities of medieval Greek!), one scholar identified numerous examples of participles with "non-agreement of case or gender" throughout the work. Other grammatical anomalies in this epic work included "hanging nominatives", "inaccurate use of genitive absolutes", "accusative absolute where genitive required", and so on.

So, if you want to debate me about Byzantine Greek grammar and my Voynich Judaeo-Greek grammar, you are at least going to have to study the grammatical forms as found and used in Digenes Akritas, to say nothing of more obscure Byzantine Greek works.

(By the way, I did some of this research on Digenes Akritas while researching medieval texts in general as part of my successful effort to decrypt Don's Voynichese ciphertext.)

Thus we have the smooth grammatical phrase "to you they are these the houses/courts". In more idiomatic English, it reads "These houses/courts belonged to you." 

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Moving on to the final phrase in the last three words of the line, we see that the author likes to end lines with short phrases with simple verbs: "eipan oun", "tis t'-eipes", and here "deite [te] vasein, phes". The verbs include "they said", "you said", and here "you see" and "you say" (or more precisely "you assert", "you claim").

It is true that "deite" is a plural "you" form, whereas the other forms are singular "you". Perhaps this was a set formulaic phrase "you see", rather than a reference to an individual specific person as in the 2nd person singular forms. Or perhaps a better explanation is that the "-te" is actually the definite article that goes with the following word "vasein", "foundation". The phrase "te vasein" is a consistent grammatical feminine accusative singular form. (The "pure" Attic Ancient Greek form would be "ten basin"; the "pure" Modern Greek form would be "te vase"; the form here "te vasein" is mainly modern but with the "classical" accusative ending "-n" added to the noun.)

This word "vase" by the way is the classical Greek word "basis", borrowed directly into almost every European language. In Ancient Greek it meant "step", "rhythm", "foot", "foundation", "base", and more, but in modern Greek its main meanings are "base", "foundation", "basis". (In the latter, the definition is the borrowing!)

The final word [dam] I read as Judaeo-Greek "fAs", representing Greek "phes", meaning "you say", "you assert", et al. It is also the verb form used when quoting someone, "sometimes after another verb of saying". In this respect, it makes sense that this verb appears in the third line after the use of the other verb "eipan", "eipes" in the first two lines.

Thus, the last three words of the line together constitute the clause "you see the foundation, you claim". It is semantically consistent with the first part of the line, as if the "you" whom the author is addressing, is looking at the foundation which is all that is left of the houses or courts that used to be theirs.

Once again, it is interesting in this respect that the Voynich ms was written only decades, at most, before the fall of Constantinople and the collapse of the entire Byzantine Emipre, when the end was surely already in sight for astute and clear-headed observers. (To give the Byzantine Empire some credit, it lasted arguably longer than the Western Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire put together.)

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I want to close by returning to the strikingly smooth poetic meter of this third line in my interpretation:

"sóu tes étan áuttoi áules, déite vásein, phés"

The first two lines are not quite so smooth, but their poetic meter is not too bad either:

"eipan  tis  ipeirous  otan  skiais  tis  ,  eipan  oun
para  autous  &  autes  tora  oikous  ouk  eisi  tes  ,  tis  t'-eipes"

The Digenes Akritas Byzantine Greek epic poem had the popular and standard medieval and modern Greek so-called "political verse" or "decapentasyllabic verse", which is 15-syllable iambic blank verse. We do not exactly have that in these three lines, but actually these lines are pretty close. If most of the Voynich ms text is composed in such a verse or something similar, it might explain the rigidity of the line lengths, the types of syllables in certain parts of the lines, the types of letters in certain parts of the lines, and so on. (Perhaps the author was using types of letters and syllables repetitively in certain parts of lines, to help him stick to the required meter? Keep in mind, it doesn't have to be *good* poetry to be an attempt to compose poetry!) Again, I am not claiming it is all going to be exactly this decapentasyllabic verse, but perhaps it is something along similar lines.

In fact, looking back at the second line, the omitted vowels in the ms text at the ends of "para", "tora", and "ouk-eisi" may make sense as the author's effort to reduce the number of syllables in the line, to make it fit within a reasonable length for the poetic meter of the line. As written in the ms text, the 2nd line reads as follows:

"par' autous & autes tor' oikous ouk-eis' tes, tis t'-eipes"

This gives the first and second lines each 14 syllables. The third line has 13 syllables; however, recall that extra vowel in the middle of "aut(i)toi". With the extra vowel included, all three lines have 14 syllables each. Since the first and third lines seem to begin with the stress on the first syllable, not the second, perhaps this is decapentasyllabic verse but with the first syllable omitted. In any case, there do seem to be 7 stressed syllables in each line, which is again in line with traditional Byzantine Greek verse. Once again, it doesn't have to be good poetry, to be an attempt to compose poetry.

Geoffrey Caveney

Geoffrey,

a fundamental point in your approach is not clear to me.

Are you saying that the Voynich MS is based on a piece of written text, that used unpointed Hebrew to write Greek?

If so, your second rendition of the text, which you call "my Judaeo-Greek interpretation" is the most important part, because this is what the source MS would have said. It should be very close to "real" Judaeo Greek, allowing for the occasional mistake.

If not, what happened? How was it done?

(20-03-2019, 08:53 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Geoffrey,

a fundamental point in your approach is not clear to me.

Are you saying that the Voynich MS is based on a piece of written text, that used unpointed Hebrew to write Greek?

If so, your second rendition of the text, which you call "my Judaeo-Greek interpretation" is the most important part, because this is what the source MS would have said. It should be very close to "real" Judaeo Greek, allowing for the occasional mistake.

If not, what happened? How was it done?

Rene,

Thank you for the good question.

I do not know if the MS was based on another piece of written text. It could have been based on another piece of Judaeo-Greek text, or it could have been the author's own composition. It could have been an attempt to put into writing some poetry that the author knew only from an oral tradition. There are other possibilities, for example that it was a translation of another text from Hebrew or another language, but these are less likely in my opinion.

Scholars do not have a large number of primary source documents of medieval Judaeo-Greek. We know it existed, we know the Greek-speaking Jewish community in the Eastern Mediterranean goes back thousands of years. There is a Greek reference to a Greek Jew dating back to the 3rd century BCE. 

But there is not a lot of surviving evidence of *written* Judaeo-Greek going very far back in history. There are medieval Greek translations in Hebrew script of the Hebrew Bible, as documented on the website "The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Then there is a printed work of the Bible published in 1547 in Hebrew, Judaeo-Spanish, and Judaeo-Greek. It is not clear to me whether any medieval written manuscripts in Judaeo-Greek (as opposed to Greek translations in Hebrew script) from before the invention of the printing press have survived.

In general, medieval Greek Jews spoke (Judaeo-)Greek, but read and wrote in Hebrew. Their written literary tradition was in Hebrew in the Hebrew script. As such, since their spoken language tended not to be written, there could very well have been some oral traditions in spoken Judaeo-Greek that rarely if ever got written down. The lines of poetry I interpret here could have been an attempt to put some of this in writing in a language that the author had never seen in written form before. On the other hand, it could have just been the original composition of the author, perhaps of uneven quality.

I should note that there are a number of archaic classical Greek forms in my lines of interpretation, interspersed with more modern medieval forms. This was typical of Byzantine Greek. If my interpretation is correct, the author must have had some awareness of such forms. But again, this awareness could still have come from a spoken and oral exposure to such work (hearing Byzantine poetry), not necessarily from a familiarity with any written Greek works in the Greek script. Once again, please keep in mind that at the time of the Voynich MS, printed works did not exist. If you didn't have access to manuscripts, you didn't see the written form of the script.

I should also mention another possible explanation for Greek to be written in such a strange script that represents its phonology so poorly. Although Constantinople did not fall until 1453, large parts of Greece itself fell under Ottoman rule well before that date, as early as the late 14th century and early 15th century. If the Greek population was being repressed at that time, it is possible that someone attempted to hide Greek texts by writing them in a different script that authorities might not recognize as Greek. Perhaps in this case the script was deliberately designed to render Greek more ambiguously, so that it would be more difficult to identify as Greek. (If so, they sure did succeed in that aim!) Of course this is a speculative theory, and it is not my main hypothesis. But we must remain open to various possible explanations for the script of the MS text.

Note that an accidentally ambiguous [a] or [o] character representing the Hebrew letters aleph or ayin in Judaeo-Greek, and a deliberately ambiguous [a] or [o] character in a script that was designed to be difficult to identify, may amount to and look like almost the same thing in practice in the interpretation of the text.

On the other hand, there were also Greek Jews living in Italy at the time -- mainly southern Italy, but some had moved to northern Italy -- who could have written a MS such as this one. My focus is on the language of the MS text, and I cannot claim to be a specialist in the origin or provenance of the MS. I am agnostic on that issue until I have additional evidence.

It could be an interesting exercise to take the medieval Greek and early modern Judaeo-Greek Bible translations in Hebrew script, take unpointed versions of them, and test them for entropy, conditional entropy, character pair distribution plots, etc. Of course it would be a lot of work to prepare such texts for this exercise. Further, I am aware that my interpretation of the Voynich MS further simplifies the script by its lack of distinction between voiced and voiceless consonant pairs. (But to be fair, the phonetic status of the voiced sounds /b/, /d/, /g/ was unclear at this intermediate stage of Greek.) But it would still be an interesting exercise.

Geoffrey

(20-03-2019, 03:06 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not know if the MS was based on another piece of written text. It could have been based on another piece of Judaeo-Greek text, or it could have been the author's own composition. It could have been an attempt to put into writing some poetry that the author knew only from an oral tradition. There are other possibilities, for example that it was a translation of another text from Hebrew or another language, but these are less likely in my opinion.

But are you not saying that you can convert the Voynich MS text to Greek written in unpointed Hebrew?

If you don't have a clear view of what was done when the MS text was composed, you cannot convert it back.

So is this, or is this not something that could have been written in Judaeo-Greek:

Quote:[]ei[A]pan  tis  ipeirous  otan  skiiAis  tis  ,  epan  oAn
par'  Atous  &Atees  tAr(a)  oikous  o(u)k-eis(i)  tees  ,  tis  t-ei[A]pAs
shio  t-Aees  heAt-an  Atitoi  AlAs  ,  deit  vasAn  ,  fAs

(20-03-2019, 04:34 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(20-03-2019, 03:06 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not know if the MS was based on another piece of written text. It could have been based on another piece of Judaeo-Greek text, or it could have been the author's own composition. It could have been an attempt to put into writing some poetry that the author knew only from an oral tradition. There are other possibilities, for example that it was a translation of another text from Hebrew or another language, but these are less likely in my opinion.

But are you not saying that you can convert the Voynich MS text to Greek written in unpointed Hebrew?

If you don't have a clear view of what was done when the MS text was composed, you cannot convert it back.

So is this, or is this not something that could have been written in Judaeo-Greek:

Quote:[]ei[A]pan  tis  ipeirous  otan  skiiAis  tis  ,  epan  oAn
par'  Atous  &Atees  tAr(a)  oikous  o(u)k-eis(i)  tees  ,  tis  t-ei[A]pAs
shio  t-Aees  heAt-an  Atitoi  AlAs  ,  deit  vasAn  ,  fAs

There is such a thing, in language and in writing, as arbitrary or free variation in the writing of forms of words.

It was even much more prevalent in the time of the Voynich ms, before the printing press and the standardization of written word forms. But it continued to occur widely for centuries thereafter, such as in the actual spellings of word forms in the various surviving texts of Shakespeare's works. And it even continues to exist today, in less formal forms and contexts of writing, as opposed to the standardized form used in formal writing such as the messages that we write on a forum such as this one.

What philologists and paleographers do, in such a situation, is they use their experience and linguistic intuition and knowledge of the language, in order to determine the intended meaning and underlying forms that the actual written forms were intended to represent. This process cannot necessarily be reduced to an explicit set of rules that the author used to generate the text, and that the interpreter must determine and apply in reverse order to "convert the text back". Medieval manuscript writing didn't work that way. A lot of writing today still doesn't work that way.

Example: in casual informal writing such as is common on social media or in text messages today, there are many ways that American English speakers write and/or abbreviate the word "because". We don't always feel like writing out such a long word to express such a simple basic concept in a function word. In one post or comment or message or text, a person might write it "because", but in another he or she might write it "becos", and in other places the same person might write it "cos" or "cuz" or "coz" or " 'cause" or " 'cos". There is not necessarily an explicit rule that we can state to determine how this person will "convert" the word "because" into any one of these many forms in any given place in the text or at any given moment. So therefore we cannot determine an explicit rule to apply in order to take any given one of these forms that we find and "convert the text back" into "because".

Let's spell out the phonological and orthographic variety of just these half dozen or so informal forms of the word "because":

* The first syllable can be written or omitted entirely, or the writer can put an apostrophe in its place.

* The vowel in the second syllable can be written as "au" or "o" or "u".

* The last consonant can be written as "s" or "z".

* The silent final "e" can be written or omitted.

When I read such text, I don't use any set of rules to "convert the text back" to the word "because". I use my vast knowledge and experience as an English speaker and reader and writer to figure it out with my intuition.

Likewise, the author of the Voynich MS could have equally well written a given word in a variety of different ways and forms, and not necessarily according to any particular rule at any particular place in the text. The variation could have been arbitrary.

We will never identify a particular set of rules to convert such a text back into a more recognizable form of any standard language and its standardized written forms and spellings of words, which actually weren't so consistently standardized in practice, especially before the invention of the printing press.

Rather, we will have to use our experience and knowledge of the language and linguistic intuition to determine our best deduction for what each word form was most likely intended by the author to represent.

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So, to answer your question, yes I believe that text is something that could have been written in Judaeo-Greek. But the same content with the same or almost the same words could also have been written in dozens of other ways in Judaeo-Greek, just as the same three lines of content with almost the same words of colloquial American English in an early 21st century social media "text" could also be written in dozens of different ways.

In both cases, only our experience and linguistic intuition and knowledge of the language will enable us to attempt to interpret the meaning of the text, not a set of explicit rules to convert the text back into some standard form.

Of course, the task is many orders of magnitude more difficult with 15th century Judaeo-Greek, because we have a lot less knowledge about it, than we do about early 21st century American English!! 

But we have some knowledge. We have knowledge of classical Ancient Greek, and we have knowledge of Modern Greek, and we have some knowledge of forms of Byzantine Greek. We have a little knowledge of written Judaeo-Greek mainly from a later time period, and some knowledge of spoken Judaeo-Greek from a more recent period. We have the knowledge of the Hebrew script and how it works, and how it relates to pronunciation when the vowel diacritic dots are written and when they are not written. We have some medieval examples of Greek written in the Hebrew script, albeit very formal and a more standard form of Greek and only as a translation of one particular very formal text, the Hebrew Bible. And we have early modern examples of Judaeo-Greek written in the Hebrew script, albeit also very formal as a translation of the same text, the Bible. We then have a modest amount of more recent modern examples of Judaeo-Greek written in the Hebrew script.

Only by piecing together all of these clues and puzzle pieces, can we ever hope to be able to interpret such an idiosyncratic text as a manuscript written in late medieval early 15th century Judaeo-Greek, in an unknown script that appears to be akin to unpointed Hebrew in terms of its representation of the language, and which uses a typically Byzantine Greek mixture of classical Greek and more modern Greek forms. There is no existing textbook or collection of documents to study that particular form of the language! We just have to use all the possible clues we can find, from all the stages and forms of the language that we can study, and try to piece the puzzle together.

I hope that the exercise in my new post today on "9-phoneme Greek text representation" is also useful in helping us to get a handle on the Voynich form of this quasi-Judaeo-Greek. During the time that I was writing this comment in reply to you, Don has already shown that a knowledgeable Greek reader/speaker can read and comprehend such a Greek text, even without any distinction made between t/th/d, k/kh/g, or p/ph/b; or between i/y/e; and with "n" and "r" exclusively in final positions, and "m" and "l" exclusively in non-final positions. This tells me that a knowledgeable Greek reader/speaker could also have been able to read the Voynich script form of Greek as I interpret it, which also lacks these same kinds of distinctions.

(20-03-2019, 06:26 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Example: in casual informal writing such as is common on social media or in text messages today, there are many ways that American English speakers write and/or abbreviate the word "because". We don't always feel like writing out such a long word to express such a simple basic concept in a function word. In one post or comment or message or text, a person might write it "because", but in another he or she might write it "becos", and in other places the same person might write it "cos" or "cuz" or "coz" or " 'cause" or " 'cos". There is not necessarily an explicit rule that we can state to determine how this person will "convert" the word "because" into any one of these many forms in any given place in the text or at any given moment. So therefore we cannot determine an explicit rule to apply in order to take any given one of these forms that we find and "convert the text back" into "because".

Let's spell out the phonological and orthographic variety of just these half dozen or so informal forms of the word "because":

* The first syllable can be written or omitted entirely, or the writer can put an apostrophe in its place.

* The vowel in the second syllable can be written as "au" or "o" or "u".

* The last consonant can be written as "s" or "z".

* The silent final "e" can be written or omitted.

When I read such text, I don't use any set of rules to "convert the text back" to the word "because". I use my vast knowledge and experience as an English speaker and reader and writer to figure it out with my intuition.

I can elaborate on this example, in a way that I believe may in fact be relevant to the interpretation of the Voynich MS:

These exact same abbreviations for "because", can also be used in colloquial American English as abbreviations for "cousin"!!

Both words share the stressed syllable [kʌz], so in colloquial abbreviated speech and informal writing, the speaker or writer may drop the other, unstressed, syllable entirely.

For example, a succinct social media comment might be "just cuz, cuz". It means "Just because, cousin", or spelling out the full contextual meaning more formally, "Just because that's the way it is, my friend."

If the same half dozen different abbreviated forms for "because" can also be abbreviated forms for "cousin", how does an American English speaker and reader like me manage to distinguish between them? It's simple: Context! I know where in a statement "because" is expected to be, and where in a statement "cousin" is expected to be. And I interpret the given written form in whichever way makes the most sense in that particular context.

I am actually doing a similar thing in my Greek interpretation of the Voynich MS. The Voynich word [sar] in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1, 2nd line, could have various possible interpretations in Greek according to my system of correspondences. I identify it as Modern Greek "tora", meaning "now", based on the context of the rest of the words that I have identified and interpreted in the sentence. Just as I can determine whether "cuz" means "because" or "cousin" in a current social media post based on context, so I can determine whether [sar] means "tora" or something else in my Greek interpretation of the Voynich MS based on context.

There is no explicit rule you can establish to determine when to convert "cuz" into "because", as opposed to when to convert "cuz" into "cousin". The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation. 

It is likely that the interpretation of the Voynich MS will need to proceed in a similar manner.

I will offer one more example of a comparison that may be relevant to the interpretation of the Voynich MS.
This one is medieval, so hopefully it will be more in keeping with the interests of readers of this forum:

As an educated, literate native English speaker, I can read my namesake Geoffrey Chaucer in the original -- with some effort.

Much of it depends upon the individual words. I can read "Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury" without any trouble at all of course, and likewise "Whan that Aprill, with his" is simple to understand. The archaic spellings are no problem at all so far.

The first challenge comes with "shoures soote". Determining the meaning of these words, without the aid of Middle English dictionaries, annotated editions, etc., would be a somewhat similar process to my method in interpreting the Voynich MS as medieval Byzantine quasi-Judaeo-Greek.

Imagine that we only knew modern English, and had to figure out the meaning of "shoures soote" by working from modern English and using the context of the text.

We would have to consider various possible alternatives for the meanings of the words with the medieval spellings "shoures" and "soote". The first word is much more tractable than the second, and we would surely figure it out first. We would have to compare similar letters and sounds. Then it would not be too difficult to identify the "u" in "shoures" with the "w" in modern English "showers", and we would know which word it had to be.

Having figured out "shoures", we should then be able to interpret the word "soote" with its strange vowels "oo". At first some people might object to this interpretation: "It looks like "soot"! How can you just change it to "sweet"? Can you make any vowel represent any other vowel that you like? Maybe you can change it to "suit", but "sweet" is going too far!" Eventually, however, we would be able to convince the skeptics and critics: The "w" in modern "sweet" is the connection to the rounded back vowel "oo".

I note in passing that "soote" was not even the standard spelling in Middle English! In fact, it is not among the first *seven* most common spellings of the word: swete, suete, sweete, swote, swoote, swoot, sote. Dictionaries only list "soote" as an alternative form of "swoote", which is itself listed as an alternative form of "swete".

These are the kinds of issues that we will have to continually be dealing with in a medieval manuscript like the Voynich MS.

Even worse, two lines later we run into the word "swich". At first this word might look more like "sweet" than "soote" did, due to its first three letters. But here it is the last consonant "ch" that is critical, and this allows us to identify the word as "such".

I daresay that I have taken not much more liberty with the vowels in my interpretation of the lines of the Voynich MS so far, than we would have to take to identify Chaucer's "soote" as "sweet", and his "swich" as "such".

Limiting myself to the "cousin" side of things, I'd take issue with your example of:

Quote:Example: in casual informal writing such as is common on social media or in text messages today, there are many ways that American English speakers write and/or abbreviate the word "because". We don't always feel like writing out such a long word to express such a simple basic concept in a function word. In one post or comment or message or text, a person might write it "because", but in another he or she might write it "becos", and in other places the same person might write it "cos" or "cuz" or "coz" or " 'cause" or " 'cos". There is not necessarily an explicit rule that we can state to determine how this person will "convert" the word "because" into any one of these many forms in any given place in the text or at any given moment. So therefore we cannot determine an explicit rule to apply in order to take any given one of these forms that we find and "convert the text back" into "because".

Your examples are those of modern abbreviations, or textual conversion of slang. The Corpus of Contemporary American English finds only 114 examples of the word "coz" in printed American English, all of which (at first glance) are either 20th century usage of pronouns or textual transcriptions of people speaking slang.
"Cos" just 1238 usages, much the same.
That isn't how people wrote in the 15th century, and it isn't how people write today.
You get homophones, or misspellings, but these can often be traced back to the teacher who taught the scribe. In the same way as today, you only get street slang when the author is writing a narrative, and even then that is post-renaissance. (Not much hip hop slang in Romance of the Rose).

Quote: There is no explicit rule you can establish to determine when to convert "cuz" into "because", as opposed to when to convert "cuz" into "cousin". The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation.

Yes there is. If the word is used as a conjunction, it's because. If it is used as a noun, it's cousin. End of.

(20-03-2019, 09:56 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

geoffrey Wrote:There is no explicit rule you can establish to determine when to convert "cuz" into "because", as opposed to when to convert "cuz" into "cousin". The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation.

Yes there is. If the word is used as a conjunction, it's because. If it is used as a noun, it's cousin. End of.

I think that's what Geoffrey said, isn't it? When he wrote, "The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation," I think he was saying you need context to know if it's a conjunction or a noun.

(21-03-2019, 07:24 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(20-03-2019, 09:56 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

geoffrey Wrote:There is no explicit rule you can establish to determine when to convert "cuz" into "because", as opposed to when to convert "cuz" into "cousin". The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation.

Yes there is. If the word is used as a conjunction, it's because. If it is used as a noun, it's cousin. End of.

I think that's what Geoffrey said, isn't it? When he wrote, "The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation," I think he was saying you need context to know if it's a conjunction or a noun.

Yes, that is indeed what I meant. In general I do agree with David's points; modern social media English "cuz" was just one example, and I do not mean to imply that the Voynich ms text is written with such words, in any language. Probably my Chaucer example is a much better one, much more relevant to the topic at hand.

And yes, when I was referring to explicit rules, it was in the context of mathematical or orthographic rules that you can apply to the letters of words and texts to analyze them statistically, such as the entropy values, conditional entropy, character pair distribution, etc., etc., that we discuss so often in relation to the Voynich ms text. Likewise, in reference to explicit rules to convert a proposed interpretation form of a text (such as my Judaeo-Greek reading of the ms) into a model standardized form of a language. 

My point is, if Chaucer or other Middle English writers could use at least 8 different forms to write "swete", "soote", etc., and Chaucer himself actually used only the 8th most common form of the word, then I can argue likewise that the Voynich ms author could have used word forms that may display a wide variety of discrepancies from any existing or extant forms of words in the same language. The discrepancies in, for example, [eeodaiin], [epaiin], and [cheodaiin] (all of which I interpret as the Greek verb form "eipan", meaning "they said") are actually no greater than the discrepancies in Middle English "soote", "swoote", "swete", "suete", "sweete", "swote", "swoote", "swoot", "sote".