The Voynich Ninja

(16-03-2019, 11:17 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The fourth step of Geoffrey's translation, where he tries to make sense of the set of Greek words that he picked as similar to his mapping of Voynichese, states that "eipan oun" means "as they said". I don't know Greek, so looking into his translation is about as difficult for me as working with Yokubinas' translation based on Hebrew.

Greek-English dictionaries point out that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does not mean "as" but "then" / "therefore". It is used to link two sentences either temporally or causally. 
"eipan oun" is a legal Greek sequence. It occurs several times in the Gospel of John meaning something like "therefore they said:". It requires both a previous sentence corresponding to the cause (or the temporal precedent) of what is said, and a following sentence (to which modern transcriptions add double quotes) corresponding to what is said. 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 21 Καὶ ἠρώτησαν αὐτόν Τί οὖν σὺ Ἠλίας εἶ Καὶ λέγει Οὐκ εἰμί Ὁ προφήτης εἶ σύ Καὶ ἀπεκρίθη Οὔ 22 Εἶπαν οὖν αὐτῷ Τίς εἶ ...
[21] kai ērōtēsan auton: ti oun? su Ēlias ei? kai legei: ouk eimi. ho prophētēs ei su? Kai apekrithē: ou. [22] eipan oun auto: tis ei? ...
They asked him, "Then who are you? Are you Elijah?" He said, "I am not." "Are you the Prophet?" He answered, "No." 22 Finally they said, "Who are you? ...

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 52 Ἐπύθετο οὖν τὴν ὥραν παρ’ αὐτῶν ἐν ᾗ κομψότερον ἔσχεν εἶπαν οὖν αὐτῷ ὅτι Ἐχθὲς ὥραν ἑβδόμην ἀφῆκεν αὐτὸν ὁ πυρετός 
epuqeto oun thn wran par autwn en h komyoteron escen eipan oun autw oti ecqes wran ebdomhn afhken auton o puretos
52 Then he inquired of them the hour when he got better. And they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.”

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 11 Ταῦτα εἶπεν καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο λέγει αὐτοῖς Λάζαρος ὁ φίλος ἡμῶν κεκοίμηται ἀλλὰ πορεύομαι ἵνα ἐξυπνίσω αὐτόν 12 Εἶπαν οὖν οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτῷ Κύριε εἰ κεκοίμηται σωθήσεται 
11:11 tauta eipen kai meta touto legei autois lazaros o filos hmwn kekoimhtai alla poreuomai ina exupnisw auton 11:12 eipan oun oi maqhtai autw kurie ei kekoimhtai swqhsetai
11 These things He said, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.” 12 Then His disciples said, “Lord, if he sleeps he will get well.”


Clealy the stock phrase "as they said" must have equivalents in Greek. A similar example I could find is :
νόθος δὲ πρὸς μητρός, ὡς λέγουσιν· Ἀβρότονον 
nόthos dè pròs mētrόs, hōs légousin Abrόtonon 
He was baseborn  from the part of his mother, who was as they say, Avrotonon 
Plutarch (Themistocles)

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is indeed the word that one expects to see as corresponding to the English conjunction "as"

I have seen no evidence from actual Greek texts of any time proving that "eipan oun" can end a sentence with the meaning of "as they said". Until such evidence is provided, I confirm that the proposed translation appears to be arbitrary and the sequence of Greek words on which it is based ungrammatical.

Marco, it is also possible that my interpretation of the last word of the line as "oun" is incorrect, but the rest of the line may still be correct. I am not wedded to the "oun". 

In a 15th century late medieval / Byzantine Greek text, especially if it is a Judaeo-Greek text, there are going to be some words that have not necessarily been previously attested in any surviving text. The Voynich ms was written literally within a few decades of the fall of Constantinople and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. Do we have extensive documentation of *15th century* Byzantine Greek? I doubt it. And we must have even less documentation of 15th century Judaeo-Greek.

Here is another possibility: Perhaps I was wrong about the first word "geio-pan" as well. Koen already pointed out a big problem with it. Well, perhaps the first letter, the Voynich gallows letter [t], is not an actual letter in the text at all, but just a "pilcrow" paragraph marker. JKP has pointed to this theory, as he mentioned in a recent comment on this forum. 

In this case, perhaps the first word is also intended to represent "eipan", "they said". Now I know we have the extraneous letter [o] in this case, but as I said, a Judaeo-Greek text written by a scribe whose literary background was the Hebrew script would not be expected to be very precise with the Greek vowels! [o] has kind of a strange distribution in the Voynich manuscript in any case; perhaps a large number of [o]'s in the ms are extraneous. It is just an idea. 

(The Greek masculine nominative singular definite article "o" could justify a substantial number of the initial [o]'s in the ms, but still, the number of initial [o]'s in the Voynich ms is rather extremely large. And the character [o] occurs in 58% of all word tokens in the entire ms. Perhaps it may signify something other than an actual letter in some instances.)

If we take the first word as "eipan", then we have the first line as "eipan tis ipeirous otan skiiais tis eipan oun", if we maintain "oun". Now we may read the first six words as one clause, "they said when the continents are in the shadows," and the last two words as the beginning of the next clause, "then they said". This syntax would actually match your examples of "eipan oun" that you cited rather closely! Again, it is just another idea.

(16-03-2019, 03:02 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Geoffrey, how well does your system generalize to a paragraph of text?

It's not especially difficult to find a line that will resolve into somewhat readable text. It's a long manuscript, there's lots of text.

But does it work if you use the same system on the phrases before and after?

JKP, this is a good question. Every line is a lot of work, as you can see from the discussion in this thread. I think my latest version at the end of my last response to Marco, "eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis , eipan oun" = "they said when the continents are in the shadows, then they said", is the best version yet, but of course all such interpretations must be considered tentative at this preliminary stage, to say the least. At least this version incorporates your pilcrow theory to disregard the gallows character that begins the first word!

The obvious next test is the very next line of text, which now must present a logical continuation of the first line and finish the clause that began "then they said". I am working on it. I can tell you that in the middle of the second line, my system interprets the Voynich word [oeteody] as "oikious" or "oikous" (I have a hypothesis that [eo] may represent a single vowel, not the two vowels in sequence). This is the Greek word "houses", and in fact if you look it up in a dictionary you will see that one of the given definitions is "one of the 12 divisions of an astrological chart"! 

Of course this also is tentative at this stage, and it remains to make grammatical sense of the rest of this second line. But the appearance of this word here is at least interesting.

Geoffrey, Have you an idea in mind of the topic? I do from what you have translated so far but I dont want to say in case it affects your future translations. From what you just added about the second line it seems to have a theme.

(16-03-2019, 05:53 PM)Linda Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Geoffrey, Have you an idea in mind of the topic? I do from what you have translated so far but I dont want to say in case it affects your future translations. From what you just added about the second line it seems to have a theme.

Linda, the first thing I think of when I read "when the continents are in the shadows" is a solar eclipse. But of course the phrase could also mean many other things. The astrological "houses" would clearly be relevant to this section of the ms with all of its astrological tables.

To give other researchers some sense of what Judaeo-Greek, or Greek written in the Hebrew script, may have looked like, I attach here an example of a couple Bible verses from the beginning of the Book of Jonah taken from a translation into Greek written in the Hebrew script. The source is the website "The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . The excerpt attached here may be found at the beginning of the parallel text on this page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . I have deliberately "blown up" the text to a very large size in the attachment, to make it as easy as possible for those less familiar with the Hebrew alphabet to be able to see the Hebrew letters as clearly as possible.

If you work through the comparison of the actual Hebrew letters in the text, on the left side of the page, with the scholars' transcription of the text into the standard Greek alphabet that we are used to, on the right side of the page, you will see how many differences there are, especially and above all in the rendition of the vowels. I will briefly discuss here several examples:

The Hebrew letter aleph does often represent Greek alpha in this text, but it can also represent Greek omicron, as in the word "kyriou" at the end of the first line. (Of course, the end of the line is on the left in the Hebrew script!) The combination "-iou" is rendered in Hebrew script as "yod"-"aleph"-"vav": the "yod" clearly represents the "i", the "vav" clearly represents the "u", so the "aleph" in the middle must here represent the "o".

But elsewhere in this text Greek omicron is represented by "vav", the same Hebrew letter that represents Greek upsilon or the omicron-upsilon diphthong! See for example "vav" as omicron in the second word "eton" and in the third word "propheteia", but then as upsilon in "kyriou". On the second line "vav" is again omicron in "pros" and "Iona", but then it represents the entire diphthong omicron-upsilon in "uiou". "vav" again represents omicron-upsilon in "tou" on the third line. (But recall that this same text used "aleph-vav" to represent omicron-upsilon in "kyriou" at the end of the first line!)

Turning our attention back to "aleph" again, in the last word of the second line "uiou" it represents the first upsilon -- then in the third line, third Greek word "eipein", Hebrew aleph represents the first Greek epsilon!

Thus in the span of just three lines and 10 Greek words, we have the Hebrew letter "aleph" used to represent no less than four different Greek vowels: alpha, omicron, upsilon, and epsilon.

I hope everyone can see that if the Voynich ms author used the characters [o] and [a] similarly to the way this Judaeo-Greek text uses "aleph", it could very easily produce "ambiguous" readings of the characters, along the lines of the ambiguous vowel qualities in my Greek interpretation of the line of Voynich text in this thread. I dare say the Hebrew vowel letters in the actual historical text that I have posted and discussed here, are rather less consistent than the vowel qualities in my interpretation of the Voynich text line.

By the way, I have hardly discussed all the ambiguities and inconsistencies in the Hebrew vowel letters in this historical text. Another example is that Greek alpha is not even always represented by Hebrew aleph: On the second line in the word "Iona", the Hebrew script uses the letter "he" at the end of the word, not "aleph", to stand in the place of the Greek alpha.

If indeed the Voynich ms is anything at all like this actual historical text here, we will have to give up insisting on complete consistency in the representation of the vowels in the text.

(16-03-2019, 04:07 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco, it is also possible that my interpretation of the last word of the line as "oun" is incorrect, but the rest of the line may still be correct.

...

Here is another possibility: Perhaps I was wrong about the first word "geio-pan" as well. Koen already pointed out a big problem with it. Well, perhaps the first letter, the Voynich gallows letter [t], is not an actual letter in the text at all, but just a "pilcrow" paragraph marker. 

I agree: it's possible that the rest of the line is correct, even if you suggest that it isn't because the first letter could be a pilcrow instead. It's possible that the text is Greek, it's possible that it is Hebrew, it's possible that it is proto-Italic....

(16-03-2019, 08:44 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-03-2019, 04:07 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco, it is also possible that my interpretation of the last word of the line as "oun" is incorrect, but the rest of the line may still be correct.

...

Here is another possibility: Perhaps I was wrong about the first word "geio-pan" as well. Koen already pointed out a big problem with it. Well, perhaps the first letter, the Voynich gallows letter [t], is not an actual letter in the text at all, but just a "pilcrow" paragraph marker. 

I agree: it's possible that the rest of the line is correct, even if you suggest that it isn't because it's also possible that the first letter is a pilcrow. It's possible that the text is Greek, it's possible that it is Hebrew, it's possible that it is proto-Italic....

I take this statement to mean that you can't find any specific criticisms to make of my latest version of the line, "eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis, eipan oun...", especially in light of the ambiguous vowel representation in Judaeo-Greek as noted in the historical Greek text in Hebrew script posted in this thread.

(16-03-2019, 08:58 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I take this statement to mean that you can't find any specific criticisms to make of my latest version of the line, "eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis, eipan oun...", especially in light of the ambiguous vowel representation in Judaeo-Greek as noted in the historical Greek text in Hebrew script posted in this thread.

No: understanding why eipan oun doesn't make sense in this context has taken me several hours of hard work. I only dedicate a limited amount of time to each four-steps translation. I will leave to others the pleasure to help you with the rest.

(16-03-2019, 09:21 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-03-2019, 08:58 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I take this statement to mean that you can't find any specific criticisms to make of my latest version of the line, "eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis, eipan oun...", especially in light of the ambiguous vowel representation in Judaeo-Greek as noted in the historical Greek text in Hebrew script posted in this thread.

No: understanding why eipan oun doesn't make sense in this context has taken me several hours of hard work. I only dedicate a limited amount of time to each four-steps translation. I will leave to others the pleasure to help you with the rest.

Marco, that is fair, and I do appreciate your hard work. I mean that sincerely, it helped me greatly to improve my interpretation of the text. It also took me several hours of hard work to correct the mistakes that you pointed out. Fair is fair.

(16-03-2019, 04:07 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Here is another possibility: Perhaps I was wrong about the first word "geio-pan" as well. Koen already pointed out a big problem with it. Well, perhaps the first letter, the Voynich gallows letter [t], is not an actual letter in the text at all, but just a "pilcrow" paragraph marker. JKP has pointed to this theory, as he mentioned in a recent comment on this forum. 

...

Please don't call it a theory.

I don't work that way.

I brainstorm. I create lists of possibilities. Then I work through them to see which ones work and which ones don't. That usually creates a shorter list.

After that, it can take a lot of research to test which might be the most fruitful lines of investigation. AFTER that, it MIGHT be possible to develop a theory but I do NOT feel I know the VMS well enough yet to work from theories—that would be premature and too constraining. I am still working through my lists of ideas. I'll let you know when I have enough info to form a theory.


The pilcrow is only one idea of several and even if there are pilcrows. I am not certain they ALL are pilcrows. I think there MIGHT be some glyphs that have more than one function.