Dear Chen Zhe:
Thank you again for all of the clear and detailed critical points that you raise. I appreciate this constructive criticism very much.
To address the last point first, clearly there was some intention to conceal the contents of the MS. If it was written in Greek, in any form, the writer had to know that simply the script alone would obscure its meaning, simply by not being written in Greek letters, Hebrew letters, Latin letters, or any other generally known script. The ambiguity of the sound values of the characters is a separate issue, but the script alone indicates an intention to conceal the contents.
On the question of reduplication and quasi-reduplication, this question actually arose in a discussion between Marco and myself in a separate thread recently, "Experimental replica of VMS properties with a given corpus", on page 5 of the thread. Marco's post was #48 in the thread; my reply was #49 in the thread. You can read You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.. My main point is brief, so I can quote it again in full right here:
"If many syllables are written separately, and if sequences such as /ten/, /dyn/, and /thain/ can be written identically as homographs, then it is much more likely that these syllables will occur consecutively in a text, creating the appearance of reduplication of Voynichese words."
Here are a couple potential examples, from a passage of Dioscorides' original Greek text of
De Materia Medica (which name is of course the well-known title of the Latin translation): One Greek word in the text is "
επικλυσθεντων". First of all, I think that the author of the Voynich MS in many cases simply chose to place "word breaks" after certain characters, such as Voynich [y], [n], [l], and [r], when they occur at the end of a syllable. In this long Greek word, the
sigma in the middle of the word ends a syllable, and it is written with Voynich [y], so here the author places a Voynich word break. Likewise the following two syllables end in Greek
nu, which would be written here as Voynich [l] or [(i)in], so again it is likely that each syllable would be written as a separate Voynich word. Now given the ambiguous nature of the script in my theory, there are several ways that each syllable could be written, but the last two syllables
could be written as identical Voynich words: [shol shol], for example.
In the "pharmacopoeia" exercise that I posted recently in this thread, in this case I actually chose to encrypt Dioscorides' Greek word "
επικλυσθεντων" as [odcthardy shaiin shol]. Furthermore, the Greek article/pronoun "
των" occurs immediately before this word, so I encrypted the whole phrase as [shol odcthardy shaiin shol]. But it could also be written as [shol odcthardy shol shol] in my system.
Here is another example from Discorides: in the text, the Greek word sequence "
απλουσθαι, δυνοντος" occurs. I have written about the phenomenon in Greek grammar known as You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.. In the Voynich MS text, I conclude that the author used this movable nu even more extensively than it typically would be used in classical Greek, which would explain the large number of Voynich words ending in Greek
nu (Voynich [l] or [(i)in]) rather than a Greek vowel. So in the case of this word sequence, the Voynich author would write it as if it were "
απλουσθαι([font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ν), δυνοντος[/font]". As in the above example, the
sigma in the middle of the first word at the end of a syllable would prompt a Voynich word break, so that the syllables "
θαι([font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ν[/font])" at the end of one word, and "
δυν" at the start of the next word, would each be written as separate, consecutive Voynich words. These syllables could appear in the Voynich MS text as the Voynich word sequence [shaiin shaiin].
In my pharmacopoeia exercise, I actually chose to encrypt these two words "
απλουσθαι([font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ν[/font]), δυνοντος" as [odar ody shaiin ckhaiin olky].
The exercise of encrypting such actual Greek texts into Voynichese according to my system has taught me that in order to express the rhyme (vowel + coda consonant, that is, syllable-final consonant) "/-in/", the author must have used Voynich [a(i)in], because [chl] and [el] are too rare to account for this common Greek rhyme. In this instance the Voynich character [a] has no phonetic value in the syllable; it is simply a placeholder, apparently for aesthetic reasons, because the author never wanted to write such sequences as [sh(i)in], [s(i)in], or [k(i)in]. (Although in fact [kiin], [kin], and [sin] do occur in the MS, albeit very, very rarely, as does [kil].)
I note that the use of [-aiin] to express Greek "/-in/" was not a barrier to Koffee's reading and comprehension of the other passage posted earlier in the thread.
Likewise Voynich [a] is simply a placeholder in the words [odcthardy] and [odar] in the phrases above, since according to my system the Greek clusters "/kl/" and "/pl/" must be written with a placeholder Voynich [a] in between them in the MS, since for example the sequence [dr] is rare, [cthr] is very rare, and [tr] is non-existent.
I will follow Chen Zhe's example and address separate points in separate posts. More to come.
Thank you very much again Chen Zhe for your thorough and constructive criticism of all of these points in my theory.
Geoffrey