(12-04-2019, 07:18 PM)Koffee Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello, I had heard of this site in the past but only actually visited it a few days ago. I actually wanted to comment in another thread first, but I guess this is as good a time as any.
I'd like to make a few observations when I have more time, but for now, here is what I make of the exercise Goeffrey proposed.
Sh - τ
o - ο
l - ν
a - ά
r - ρ
sh - τ
o - ο
n - ν
ch - ῾
a - η
iin - μ
o - ώ
l - ν
sh - τ
o - ο
l - ν
o - ε
p - π
ch - ι
e - ο
d - ύ
y - σ
ch - ι
o - ο
l - ν
s - δ
o - ό
y - ς
ch - ᾿
a - η
iin - μ
ch - (blank initial, as per your Note 3)
a - ί
iin - ν
y - σ
ch - ή
a - (dunno about this one, I assume it attaches to the -iin below)
iin - μ
ch - (blank initial)
o - ε
r - ρ
o - ο
l - ν
It's an excerpt from the Lord's Prayer, I assume this is what you encoded? I was fairly certain of the beginning (τὸν άρτον), and after figuring out the end, I kinda put the pieces together. I checked to see if all of it fits with your schematic, and the only part I am not so sure about is the /a/ in the second-to-last word.
The issue of ambiguous mappings has already been raised of course, but if I can add to that, if I had gone word-for-word in a linear way, simply with trial and error, (which I did for a while) it would have taken way too much time, at least without some sort of clue/key, (which I did have for this text, as it is indeed a "well-known text", but for the actual VM...? it would get very complicated without a key for mappings or sth)
Anyway, this is a nice forum with a lot of interesting discussions, I'm looking forward to reading even more, on this site and the various blogs, since I have a lot of catching up to do 
Well done Koffee, you are exactly right of course.
Allow me to second Koen's welcome, we definitely need more and better Greek speakers and readers on the forum!
See, I told you all that it is possible to read Voynichese as Greek with my system. Naturally it is easier to figure out with a well-known text.
The striking thing for me is how naturally "Voynichese" the encoding appears, beginning from pure Greek and following my system. I consider this a good sign:
[ shol ar shol chaiin ol shol opchedy chol soy chaiin chaiin ychaiin chorol ]
" τον αρτον ημων τον επιουσιον δος ημιν σημερον. "
Literal word-for-word translation:
" The bread of us the daily give us today. "
Much more familiar to us as:
" Give us this day our daily bread. "
Koffee, in terms of linear word-for-word trial and error, I recommend that as a first step, you simply transliterate the Voynichese into what I call the "10-letter Greek alphabet"
[ch], [e] > iota
[a] > alpha
[o] > omicron
[d] > upsilon
[p], [f] > pi
[k], [s], [sh] with open loop > tau
[t], [q] > kappa
[y], [m], [g] > sigma
[l], [(i)in], [sh] with closed loop > nu
[r] > rho
I have found letter frequency statistics for the Greek New Testament, for example, and in fact these 10 letters constitute
70 percent of the entire text. Most of the rest is epsilon (10 percent), eta (4 percent), and omega (3 percent). This means that only a mere
13 percent of the entire Greek text consists of the remaining
11 consonant letters:
beta, gamma, delta, zeta, theta, lambda, mu, xi, phi, chi, psi
So if you start with the initial assumption that the whole text is part of the "10-letter Greek alphabet", you will already be likely to have a large majority of the text correct just with this first step. Then you can work through the text and see which letters need to be changed to make the text read as intelligible Greek, which I am certain that you can do better than I can, for example.
Here is how the process would work for this line of text, for example:
[ shol ar shol chaiin ol shol opchedy chol soy chaiin chaiin ychaiin chorol ]
" ton ar ton ian on ton opiius ion tos ian ian sian ioron "
or in Greek letters:
" τον αρ τον ιαν ον τον οπιιυς ιον τος ιαν ιαν σιαν ιορον "
Since the word breaks of Voynichese and Greek are not the same,
Greek paleographers might be more used to dealing with text such as the following:
" [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]τοναρτονιανοντονοπιιυσιοντοσιανιανσιανιορον "[/font]
You can see that in fact, just with this simple
and automatic process as a first step, you already have the first two Greek words (three Voynich words) "
τον αρτον" exactly correct. This is not an accident: it happens because we chose the most frequent Greek letters for our 10-letter Greek alphabet.
The next critical key step is to recognize where the iota's should really just be "rough breathing" /h/ sounds before word-initial Greek vowels:
"
τον αρτον `αν ον τον οπιιυς ιον τος `αν ιαν σιαν ιορον"
Next, one is of course aware that mu and lamdba are by far the most frequent consonants missing from our 10-letter Greek alphabet, so the next step is to check for those letters. It is helpful here, as it often will be, to recognize the presence of two forms of the same root word in this line, which aids in figuring out where two of the nu's need to be changed to mu's:
"
τον αρτον `α[font=Arial]μον τον οπιιυς ιον τος `αμιαν σιαν ιορον[/font]"
At this stage, I don't think it will be too difficult for a Greek speaker and reader (Koffee, please comment!) to recognize the tau that needs to be changed to a delta, and the one additional nu that needs to be changed to a mu:
"
τον αρτον `α[font=Arial]μον τον οπιιυς ιον δος `αμιαν σιαμιορον[/font]"
Finally, once one has figured out all the consonants in this way, I don't think the various vowel changes that need to be made, will present too many difficulties for a Greek speaker and reader (Koffee, please comment!). I note in particular that many of the eta's were represented as "iota+alpha" in the initial 10-letter Greek transliteration step. It is too soon to tell if it will be possible to make this into a general rule, or if it just a tendency, or if it just a coincidence in this line, but it is the kind of pattern that I am looking for as I try to improve the capacity of the system to decrypt Voynichese into Greek more smoothly and efficiently with increasingly precise rules. I have always recognized that this is a work in progress.
"
τον αρτον `[font=Arial]η[/font][font=Arial]μ[font=Arial]ω[/font]ν τον οπιουσιον δος `ημιαν σημιορον[/font]"
Koffee, regarding your question about the character [a] in the second-to-last Voynich word, it appears that in this line it is best to consider the sequence [cha] as Greek
eta. As I wrote in the previous paragraph, I will have to investigate whether this can be identified as a more general tendency or even a rule in Voynichese.
If indeed [cha] is
eta, then this would also explain [cha] =
iota in the third-to-last Voynich word, since
eta and
iota were certainly pronounced identically by the late medieval period of the Voynich MS (in fact, since a long time before that), as they are in modern Greek today. The final step is to recognize where an "
ο" and an "
ιο" need to be changed to epsilon's, and with that we have our complete Greek text:
"
τον αρτον `[font=Arial]η[/font][font=Arial]μ[font=Arial]ω[/font]ν τον επιουσιον δος `ημιν σημ[font=Arial]ε[/font]ρον[/font]"
Important observation on method: Although the vowels present the greatest difficulties for the technical precision of formulating the cryptological rules of my system, they do not present such a great difficulty in the practical reading and interpretation of a Voynichese text as the consonants do. The critical step in the process above certainly appears to be identifying which consonants need to be changed from the initial 10-letter Greek alphabet to other letters. Once all the consonants are correctly identified and in place, I don't think the remaining vowel change identifications present the same level of difficulty to the reader.
Koffee, what do you think of all these steps in the process? Do you agree with me about the consonants and the vowels? Your feedback as a native Greek speaker and reader is critical and precious to me for the deeper and more precise research of my method and my system that I have presented here.
Geoffrey