16-10-2019, 04:21 AM
(15-10-2019, 11:05 PM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would absolutely love it if the VM were written in Greek, of any time period. I've been working with Greek for decades and this would mean that I could read it if we only could decipher the writing system. But ... I don't think the Judeo-Greek theory is viable. Every purported translation on this thread is bad, ungrammatical Greek with nonsense words. Unless the theory is that the VM is written in Greek by someone who doesn't know Greek, this theory is a dead end.
You're in a much better position to judge this than me, Stephen, as I don't read Greek.
This whole discussion raises an interesting question for me: If the VMS is written in a well-documented language, how much, and what kinds, of spelling and grammar mistakes should be expected in a correct transliteration? When I jot down handwritten notes, my spelling and grammar are usually not perfect English. But nor are the errors typically ones that make the note incomprehensible to another English reader. For a language as well-attested as Greek or Latin, I imagine it wouldn't be hard for an experienced reader of medieval writings to tell the difference between writing that's "rough in the right way" from writing that's "rough in the wrong way".
On the other hand, if the VMS is written in a language that was unwritten or left very few written specimens, I'm not so sure it would be easy for anyone to tell the difference between a correct translation into a rough and informal variety of the language, and a wrong translation. If we have no basis for saying how the language we're proposing typically became simplified under informal and vernacular conditions, then it's very hard to gauge what liberties can and cannot be taken in interpreting what the author meant to write, based on what he actually did write.