Marco and David, thank you for the feedback. Marco's suggestions for study make sense. I appreciate them. David's comments about and comparisons with various Judaeo-Spanish writing systems are also interesting and helpful, and I appreciate this as well.
(01-04-2019, 09:56 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.OK Geoffrey, let me be blunt. You have no knowledge of this script, of Hebrew, of Yevanic or of medieval Greek. Therefore, I trust your transription and translation as much as I trust my own - Not At All.
It is fair for others to ask me to be precise in my statements, and I ask that others please be precise in their statements as well. I have little knowledge of the difficult details of an obscure medieval Hebrew cursive script, that is true. For the record, I never claimed otherwise, and I never claimed that my reading of the one word in the Yevanic text, which I did out of curiosity, was definitive. To the extent that Yevanic and medieval Greek have a significant degree of similarity with classical Greek and/or with modern Greek, I have
some knowledge of them. I am learning and studying more about the particularities of these dialects, but of course my study is a work in progress. As I wrote above, Marco's recommendations all make sense in this regard. The reality is that the vast majority of Greek students and scholars focus on Ancient Greek: 5th century BCE Attic Greek and Homeric Greek. This is natural; many of the world's greatest literary works are written in these two dialects. New Testament Koine Greek is relatively well studied as well, of course; again, one of the world's great literary works is written in it. Beyond that, only a relatively small number of students of Greek ever study modern Greek. For the record, I never claimed to be a
specialist or an
expert in classical Greek or modern Greek either. Most of my formal foreign language study in secondary school and at university was in Latin and Russian. (It is clear to me for example that the contributor Markus on this forum knows Ancient Greek much better than I do, and his assistance with my interpretations is greatly and heartily appreciated.) So I am improving my knowledge of both classical and modern Greek now too, and clearly I can read and write and parse grammatical sentences in them, and of course the abundance of substantial and accessible reference works on these languages provides great assistance to any scholar and researcher as well. Then when it comes to medieval Greek...let's be honest, how tiny is the proportion of students and scholars of Greek who advance through Attic Greek, Homeric Greek, Koine Greek, ...and then modern Greek, and also study medieval Greek as well? It is an unfortunate reality that as soon as I learned the
name of the Byzantine epic poem
Digenes Akritas, I probably knew more about medieval Greek literature than most people do. I learned something about the poetic meter of it and other Byzantine poetry, and made comparisons to the poetic meter that I found to emerge in my interpretation of the four-line poem on the top of You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. 1. One does not need to be an expert or a specialist in Byzantine poetry to learn some basic facts about such things. I even read a scholarly study in an edition of
Digenis Akritis (note the alternate spelling) and learned, for example, that many participles used in it are not in the classically "correct" gender or case according to classical Greek grammatical standards. This is useful information to know, when one is attempting to read and interpret a text as medieval Greek and deciding which grammatical forms and phrases and word combinations to accept or reject.
For the record, I have studied a little Hebrew. Not a lot, but some. Even the ability to type Hebrew letters and insert them into documents as I have in this forum is no trivial feat; I have seen scholarly works (not by Hebrew scholars) mangle the formatting of Hebrew quotes quite badly. (Typical situation: an inserted right-to-left Hebrew quote within a left-to-right text is written across two lines, the right side of one line and the left side of the next line. Does one begin to read the Hebrew quote right-to-left starting from the right side of the first line, or starting from the right side of the whole quote on the second line? I have seen the former formatting in some scholarly works, and the latter formatting in others.) It took a great deal of patience and care even to be able to insert the right-to-left Hebrew letters in between the left-to-right regular commas, words, and other symbols in my Greek letter : Hebrew letter : Voynich character correspondence table. Anyone who has ever tried to combine left-to-right and right-to-left scripts in an interwoven running text will understand exactly what I am talking about, and the great difficulty and frustration it always seems to involve. (Tip to everyone: Type
all of the left-to-right text first, and only after that, insert each right-to-left letter, word, or phrase into its "slot" within the left-to-right text. Never try to type left-to-right text after having inserted right-to-left text already; this is hopeless; word processing programs cannot cope with it.) In terms of the Hebrew language itself, it has not been directly relevant to this thread, so I have not posted about it. As I said, I have studied some of it, working through all the chapters of an introductory textbook and grammar. I have done the same with Syriac and Aramaic. I have by no means achieved 100% natural fluency in reading these languages, but I could recognize some Hebrew and Aramaic words and grammatical forms if and when they occur in a Yevanic text, for example. I do highly recommend at least a modest amount of study of these beautiful languages to everyone. When you read even the very first line of the first Psalm, and see first the homophonic alliteration of "asherey" ("Happy is") and "asher" ("who"), and then the antithesis of the antonym "reshayim" ("the wicked"), with the letters and vowels of the root of "happy", aleph+"a"+shin+"e"+resh, being virtually
exactly reversed in the letters and vowels of the root of "wicked", resh+"e"+shin+"a"+ayin, you will already begin to appreciate a sense of the poetic beauty of Biblical Hebrew. (Also note the one aleph/ayin alternation in this antithesis. The distinction is purely etymological even in Hebrew, which is why I feel comfortable treating them as interchangeable in my quasi-Judaeo-Greek theory of the Voynich MS as well.)
Now some people might argue, "Why should Geoffrey be trying to decipher and read and interpret the Voynich MS at all? If he thinks it is written in Greek in the late medieval period in a script based on or inspired by the Hebrew script of Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek, why not leave it to the scholars and specialists and experts of those languages and dialects and scripts to study and research and investigate?"
The problem is, the number of such scholars and specialists and experts is extremely limited. The prerequisites for specialization and expertise in such a field may include Latin, Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, modern Greek, medieval Greek, early modern Greek, Biblical Hebrew, medieval written Hebrew, Classical Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, perhaps medieval Aramaic, ...and then, with all of those prerequisites mastered, a scholar is fully prepared to tackle medieval or early modern Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek. Marco is absolutely right when he says, "Yevanic has been studied by scholars: reinventing such a huge and complex wheel is something that cannot be done in a lifetime." Absolutely true. But the thing is, this extremely small and limited number of specialists in this field cannot simply drop everything else in their critically important and difficult research and scholarship, and devote a substantial amount of their time and effort on an investigation of the Voynich MS that may or may not bear any scholarly fruit at all.
So in these initial stages of the investigation, amateur researchers such as myself and many other contributors to this forum still have a significant role to play and I argue a potentially valuable service to offer in the course of the research and investigation. Where professionals cannot afford to contribute their time and effort, we can offer to volunteer our time and effort. Michael Ventris was not a professional scholar at all. He was a talented amateur investigator who, along with many others, volunteered his own time and effort to study and research and investigate Linear B. He knew some Greek and other languages, but not as a professional scholar. He did not have specialized scholarly expertise in archaic pre-Homeric Greek.
Nevertheless, Ventris correctly discovered and identified the language of Linear B as Greek. At a certain stage, to deal with and make sense of the extremely complicated and obscure details of the very archaic Mycenaean Greek dialect (which particular dialect was not even known to exist until this discovery), Ventris had to obtain the critical assistance and close cooperation of John Chadwick, a professional scholar and specialist in archaic Greek.
If my theory has merit, then of course I likewise at a certain stage of the research and investigation will also need to obtain the assistance and cooperation of a professional scholar or scholars who specialize in the dialects under investigation. But it is an open question at which stage, if ever, I will be able to build a body of a sufficient amount of circumstantial evidence for my theory, to convince any professional scholar that it is worth their time and effort to take a closer look at it. I never presume the worthiness of such an effort on the scholars' part; they are busy and their own research is vitally important, especially in a field such as Yevanic! So I understand that I must be patient in terms of requesting and obtaining such assistance.
In the meantime, in the absence of professional scholarly cooperation, which as I explain is entirely understandable on their part, the best that I can do is to conduct my own provisional investigation. That is what I am doing and presenting in this thread. The assistance and criticism and feedback that I have received here are precious and invaluable. In the past I had pursued some other lines of investigation on my own, without the discussion and critical feedback, and I made some foolish mistakes which never got realized or corrected for far too long. Now on this forum and in this thread, I can be confident that any foolish mistakes will be quickly noticed and pointed out, and I can fix them and correct them. This has already happened numerous times in the 140 posts/comments to date in this thread, and I am deeply appreciative for all of them.
Yes, my readings and interpretations are not Yevanic per se. They are a mixture of classical and medieval/modern Greek in a form and a script which I propose has certain parallels with Greek as it is written in the Hebrew script. To be absolutely precise I should always refer to the hypothesized intermediate stage between the original Greek (whether actually written or merely spoken and heard) and the Voynich final form as "quasi-Judaeo-Greek" or simply "Greek in Hebrew script". But there is a limit to how long the theory names and thread titles and column headings of tables can reasonably be, and in many places "Judaeo-Greek" is simply a convenient abbreviated way to express either of the more technically accurate descriptions "quasi-Judaeo-Greek" or "Greek in Hebrew script".
By the way, about the distinction you emphasize between Yevanic being
pronounced into Greek vs. being
transcribed into Greek: When I provide the Greek spellings of words in my readings and interpretations, in the Greek alphabet, I do so for the convenience of the many readers who know Greek and are familiar with seeing and reading Greek words and text mainly in this form. I am familiar with linguistics and its theory, terminology, and notation, and I could present everything as pure pronunciations in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In this case the stages of the readings / interpretations, and the columns of the correspondence table, would be IPA phonetic, Greek phonemic, Greek as written in Hebrew script, and Voynich final form. But if I only did it this way, with phonetic symbols, a phonemic form which looks very much like a Latin transcription or transliteration, Hebrew letters, and Voynich characters or their equivalents, then I predict that very many Greek scholars and students would be disappointed or even upset that I presented my work in just about every script possible
except the Greek script! So yes, I always include the Greek script equivalent of every form I present as well. That does not mean that the given word in question was ever actually written in the Greek alphabet: It may have only been spoken and heard and pronounced in Greek, then written in Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek or quasi-Judaeo-Greek or the Hebrew script or something similar, and then encrypted into the Voynich MS script. But I still present the standard Greek alphabet forms of the words, because I very much appreciate the feedback and commentary of readers who know Greek, and they appreciate reading it in the Greek alphabet.
(01-04-2019, 09:56 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In their own way, all three interpretations are equally valid. There's no way to tell. It just shows how subjective the whole thing is.
Well, I am sure that there is one correct interpretation, and all other interpretations are wrong. Perhaps one of our three readings is correct, or perhaps all three of us are wrong. By the way, I still think my reading is the right one. In case anyone is curious, what Marco identified as the last two letters, that is the whole word that I was referring to, and I read it as the four letters that I described. BUT, I admit and accept the point that I do not have specialized knowledge of this script, and medieval Hebrew cursive scripts are known to be very difficult, and I accept your point that there is little purpose in me attempting to read this script on my own at this stage. But please don't be surprised or shocked if eventually when a qualified scholar comes around and takes a look at this word, they tell you, oh by the way Geoffrey was actually right in his reading in the first place. I just don't have the background or qualifications to be able to prove it convincingly to anyone at this stage right now.
(01-04-2019, 09:56 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As for the diacritics (nikkud really, a diacritic properly speaking is something else), it's semi cursive handwriting. They'll be using the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. system, with weak consonants. Remember that Yevanic is pronounced into Greek, not transcribed.
To take an example from Judeo-Spanish written in Greek (a similar thing - it's worth pointing out that Judeo-Spanish written in Hebrew has a much larger study base than Yevanic), we see that esto (this) is written as ^Estw. Can't get the Greek letters here so I'll stop with the example. It's a phonetic reading, not a direct translation. For more, see Romero Ray, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Certainly the explanation on how diacritics were reused by the Jewish author to indicate Spanish style stress on words is worth a read.
David, I very much appreciate the recommendation of this fascinating article about Judeo-Spanish written in the Greek alphabet (!). Very interesting. I do have a lot of exposure to spoken and written Spanish living in the New York City area, I often find to my own surprise that I can read many Spanish ads, official announcements, and news broadcasts almost as easily as I read English, so I am always interested in relevant Spanish sources of all types. (I needed my knowledge of Spanish -- and Hebrew -- to correct on my own my initial mistake in identifying the bilingual Hebrew / Judeo-Spanish parallel text that I posted earlier in this thread, for example.)
I do understand about the use of weak consonants as
matres lectionis to more or less indicate the vowels in these scripts. Usually, they are Hebrew
yod for /i/ and sometimes /e/, Hebrew
vav for /u/ and sometimes /o/, Hebrew
aleph and/or
ayin in a variety of ways, and sometimes Hebrew
he as well.
In fact, my proposed Voynich theory essentially has a
matres lectionis system as well! That's what all those "A"s and "O"s and u's and i's in my proposed transcriptions really are. I interpret Voynich [a], [o], [e], (i), and sometimes [d] and [ch], as such
matres lectionis letters. However, my theory also proposes another layer of ambiguation as an encryption step employed by the author to produce the final cipher text and script in the form in which we see it in the MS. Just as any of the Greek consonants /t/, /th/, /d/ could end up as either [k] or [s] in the final MS script, so too could any of the Greek vowels /a/, /o/, or /e/ end up as either [a] or [o] in the final MS script. It is a
matres lectionis system with a layer of encryption by means of ambiguation on top of it. So no, it will not read as smoothly as the script of any actual Judaeo-Greek or Judaeo-Spanish text will. I propose that it was deliberately designed not to be able to be read so smoothly and easily. I do still think it could be read by those intended readers who were initiated and who knew how the whole system worked.
Yes, there is
some ambiguity in the representation of vowels in any writing system based on an abjad such as the Hebrew, Arabic, or Syriac/Aramaic script. Those writing systems that regularly employ nikkud can indeed be written without them, whether in cursive handwriting or otherwise. I don't believe that every time a writer switched from block letters with nikkud to cursive letters without nikkud, that every single time they did this, they changed all the spellings to include every single
matres lectionis letter in the cursive that they typically did not write in the block letters with nikkud. I
know this is the case with Hebrew itself; I know this is the case with Arabic; I know this is the case with Syriac and Aramaic.
I believe this is also likely to have been the case with Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek as well,
even though as we all know Greek is not a Semitic langauge. I cannot yet prove it to your satisfaction, because the only very few and rare extant examples that would allow me to prove it, are written in a type of cursive script so obscure and difficult that it will take me many years of study of various prerequisite languages and dialects and scripts to be able to read those few and rare extant examples fluently, as Marco has pointed out.
But at the same time, neither can you possibly know for certain that Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek could
not have been written sometimes in cursive without nikkud and without adding any extra
matres lectionis letters that were not typically present in the standard forms of words with nikkud. So let's agree for the time being that neither one of us can make an absolute categorical unqualified statement yet about the possibility or impossibility of Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek having been written sometimes without nikkud and without adding extra
matres lectionis letters for each and every Greek vowel in each and every word. Another reason to avoid absolute categorical unqualified statements about this matter, either way, is that so few extant examples of medieval written Yevanic / Judaeo-Greek have survived
at all, that we cannot be certain that there did not exist other examples that could have been written in a variant way, with more or less precision in the representation of all of the vowels, which unfortunately may not have survived, or which may not yet have been discovered.
And yes, no matter how much ambiguity there may or may not have been in the representation of the vowels in Yevanic / Judaeo-Greek in various forms of writing it, still I agree that there would be more ambiguity in the form in which I propose that it appears in the Voynich MS according to my theory. I never claimed that the Voynich MS script representation, even of the vowels, could correspond in a precisely one-to-one manner with any Judaeo-Greek representation of the same type of language or text. As I have tried to explain, according to my theory there must have been an additional layer of ambiguity added as an encryption method employed by the author of the MS.
I do hope that we can all continue to have a productive, respectful discussion about all of these matters, no matter how much we may or may not agree or disagree about each of the particular details and issues in question.
-------
Geoffrey
"An expert is someone who has already made every mistake that it is possible to make in a given field." - Niels Bohr
Still working on that
![[Image: yevanic_vwl.gif]](https://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/yevanic_vwl.gif)