16-03-2019, 10:58 PM
To JKP and others who may be interested, I now have a tentative (Judaeo-)Greek reading of the 2nd line of the same passage, at the top of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1. I present it here together with my latest version of the 1st line. I want to thank in particular Marco, Koen, and Rene, because their critical comments on my original interpretation highlighted several weaknesses that allowed me to amend and improve my interpretation. As Benjamin Franklin said, "My critics are really my friends, because they point out my weaknesses."
Note: in my rendition of the "Judaeo-Greek" text below, I am going to use the transcription "A" to stand for a letter that could have been represented in a Judaeo-Greek text by the Hebrew letter "aleph". As I noted in my post about the historical text earlier, when Greek was written in the Hebrew script, the Hebrew letter aleph could represent a rather wide variety of vowels, often Greek alpha, but also omicron or epsilon or upsilon. I do not use this symbol anywhere near that freely in my interpretation below, but I do use it in some places.
first two lines of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1 in the Voynich ms text:
[t]eeodaiin shey epairody osaiin yteeoey shey epaiin oaiin
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]daiir okeody qoekeeg sar oeteody oteey keey key keeodal[/font]
my Judaeo-Greek interpretation of this text:
[]ei[A]pan tis ipeirous otan skiiAis tis , epan oAn
par' Atous &Atees tAr(a) oikous o(u)k-eis(i) tees , tes []ei[A]pan
Now "normalizing" this Judaeo-Greek text into a more standard Greek form:
eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis , eipan oun
para autous & autes tora oikous ouk eisi tes , tes eipan
Very literal word-for-word English translation in the same word order as the Greek:
"they said the continents when in the shadows , they said then"
"beside them (masc. & fem.) now [astrol.] houses not are they , they said"
Idiomatic English translation:
"They said when the continents are in the shadows, then they said
now the (astrological) houses are not beside them, they said"
=====
Comments: As I pointed out in my post about historical Judaeo-Greek, some ambiguity in the representation of Greek vowels is inevitable in such a script. Neither Hebrew nor Voynichese can possibly render all the Greek vowels as precisely as the Greek script itself does.
The abbreviated form <par'> for the Greek preposition para (the source of our prefix in paranormal, paramilitary, etc.) is not just something I made up. It is a standard Modern Greek abbreviation of the word that appears in dictionaries.
Now "para" has a wide variety of meanings in Greek, sometimes seemingly contradictory. I think the meaning I choose here, "beside", is the most basic: "beside, by, near". But it can also mean "contrary to" or "despite", and it can also mean "from" or "because of".
I cannot be certain yet about the interpretation of the third word [qoekeeg]. We need more data to be more certain about the meaning of the "qo-" prefix, which I am simply guessing is like an ampersand. And the [g] at the end of the word is a rare letter, so I cannot be certain which letter it represents. I am guessing it is an alternate form of "s".
In this case, the phrase [okeody qoekeeg] is simply the masculine and feminine words for "them" in Greek, "autous" and "autes".
[sar] is a difficult word to interpret in this script. I have to treat it like a Greek word in the Hebrew script, in which the vowel letter in the middle can be ambiguous, and a final vowel at the end may not be written with a letter at all (also normal in the Hebrew script). With these suppositions, we may interpret this word as the common Greek word "tora", meaning "now".
I mentioned in a previous comment that I have come to believe that the sequence [eo] is a single unit. So in [oeteody] I think it just represents Greek "o", and thus the word is "oikous", meaning "houses". Standard Greek dictionaries include the definition "one of the 12 divisions of an astrological chart" for this word.
The word [oteey] I read as "okeis", and again with a very normal allowance for the way the Hebrew script represents Greek vowels, this gives us "ouk-eisi". This is the standard Greek phrase "ouk eisi" meaning "(they) are not".
The Greek word "tes" which follows is simply "they". This would be considered a "pleonastic" use of the pronoun, that is, a repetition for emphasis. I do understand that the gender of the pronoun may be a complicated question here, but perhaps the reason for the feminine pronoun here will become more clear when more of the text is interpreted.
Thus the first seven words of the second line form a Greek phrase that completes the clause begun with "then they said" at the end of the first line:
"para autos & autes tora oikous ouk eisi tes"
"beside them (m&f) now houses not are they"
"now the houses are not beside them"
Again, due to the ambiguity of the Greek preposition "para", in this phrase "beside them" might instead be "against them" or "near them" or even perhaps "beyond them" or "above them". This is the ambiguity of the Greek language, not the ambiguity of my method of reading the Voynich ms.
Finally, the last two words of the second line I interpret as "tes eipan", which is "they said" again. Once again I cannot yet explain the feminine gender of "they" in the Greek here; perhaps the next two lines will explain that, or perhaps the reader needs to have some knowledge and understanding of the context that is not explicitly expressed or explained in the text in order to understand it. (Feminine "they" could refer to some beings along the lines of the Furies or the Muses or some other such beings, which may or may not be explicitly indicated in the text.)
In the last word, I have to interpret it in much the same way as the very first word of the first line, disregarding the first gallows character and the [o] in the middle. Of course I will need to develop a more complete explanation for such extraneous characters when I have more of the text interpreted, since in this case I cannot treat the initial gallows character as a pilcrow.
So there you have it. Love it or hate it, accept it or reject it, find it interesting or laugh at it. The reaction is up to you.
Once again, I very much look forward to any and all critical comments about my method, the grammatical or ungrammatical Greek reading of the text, etc. I have made an effort to be very clear in my above comments about exactly where any uncertainty or ambiguity in my method may lie. The critical comments about the first line by Koen, Rene, and Marco were very helpful to me in fixing and sharpening some weak points in my original interpretation, and I appreciate them very much. I welcome more such critical comments about the second line.
Note: in my rendition of the "Judaeo-Greek" text below, I am going to use the transcription "A" to stand for a letter that could have been represented in a Judaeo-Greek text by the Hebrew letter "aleph". As I noted in my post about the historical text earlier, when Greek was written in the Hebrew script, the Hebrew letter aleph could represent a rather wide variety of vowels, often Greek alpha, but also omicron or epsilon or upsilon. I do not use this symbol anywhere near that freely in my interpretation below, but I do use it in some places.
first two lines of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1 in the Voynich ms text:
[t]eeodaiin shey epairody osaiin yteeoey shey epaiin oaiin
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]daiir okeody qoekeeg sar oeteody oteey keey key keeodal[/font]
my Judaeo-Greek interpretation of this text:
[]ei[A]pan tis ipeirous otan skiiAis tis , epan oAn
par' Atous &Atees tAr(a) oikous o(u)k-eis(i) tees , tes []ei[A]pan
Now "normalizing" this Judaeo-Greek text into a more standard Greek form:
eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis , eipan oun
para autous & autes tora oikous ouk eisi tes , tes eipan
Very literal word-for-word English translation in the same word order as the Greek:
"they said the continents when in the shadows , they said then"
"beside them (masc. & fem.) now [astrol.] houses not are they , they said"
Idiomatic English translation:
"They said when the continents are in the shadows, then they said
now the (astrological) houses are not beside them, they said"
=====
Comments: As I pointed out in my post about historical Judaeo-Greek, some ambiguity in the representation of Greek vowels is inevitable in such a script. Neither Hebrew nor Voynichese can possibly render all the Greek vowels as precisely as the Greek script itself does.
The abbreviated form <par'> for the Greek preposition para (the source of our prefix in paranormal, paramilitary, etc.) is not just something I made up. It is a standard Modern Greek abbreviation of the word that appears in dictionaries.
Now "para" has a wide variety of meanings in Greek, sometimes seemingly contradictory. I think the meaning I choose here, "beside", is the most basic: "beside, by, near". But it can also mean "contrary to" or "despite", and it can also mean "from" or "because of".
I cannot be certain yet about the interpretation of the third word [qoekeeg]. We need more data to be more certain about the meaning of the "qo-" prefix, which I am simply guessing is like an ampersand. And the [g] at the end of the word is a rare letter, so I cannot be certain which letter it represents. I am guessing it is an alternate form of "s".
In this case, the phrase [okeody qoekeeg] is simply the masculine and feminine words for "them" in Greek, "autous" and "autes".
[sar] is a difficult word to interpret in this script. I have to treat it like a Greek word in the Hebrew script, in which the vowel letter in the middle can be ambiguous, and a final vowel at the end may not be written with a letter at all (also normal in the Hebrew script). With these suppositions, we may interpret this word as the common Greek word "tora", meaning "now".
I mentioned in a previous comment that I have come to believe that the sequence [eo] is a single unit. So in [oeteody] I think it just represents Greek "o", and thus the word is "oikous", meaning "houses". Standard Greek dictionaries include the definition "one of the 12 divisions of an astrological chart" for this word.
The word [oteey] I read as "okeis", and again with a very normal allowance for the way the Hebrew script represents Greek vowels, this gives us "ouk-eisi". This is the standard Greek phrase "ouk eisi" meaning "(they) are not".
The Greek word "tes" which follows is simply "they". This would be considered a "pleonastic" use of the pronoun, that is, a repetition for emphasis. I do understand that the gender of the pronoun may be a complicated question here, but perhaps the reason for the feminine pronoun here will become more clear when more of the text is interpreted.
Thus the first seven words of the second line form a Greek phrase that completes the clause begun with "then they said" at the end of the first line:
"para autos & autes tora oikous ouk eisi tes"
"beside them (m&f) now houses not are they"
"now the houses are not beside them"
Again, due to the ambiguity of the Greek preposition "para", in this phrase "beside them" might instead be "against them" or "near them" or even perhaps "beyond them" or "above them". This is the ambiguity of the Greek language, not the ambiguity of my method of reading the Voynich ms.
Finally, the last two words of the second line I interpret as "tes eipan", which is "they said" again. Once again I cannot yet explain the feminine gender of "they" in the Greek here; perhaps the next two lines will explain that, or perhaps the reader needs to have some knowledge and understanding of the context that is not explicitly expressed or explained in the text in order to understand it. (Feminine "they" could refer to some beings along the lines of the Furies or the Muses or some other such beings, which may or may not be explicitly indicated in the text.)
In the last word, I have to interpret it in much the same way as the very first word of the first line, disregarding the first gallows character and the [o] in the middle. Of course I will need to develop a more complete explanation for such extraneous characters when I have more of the text interpreted, since in this case I cannot treat the initial gallows character as a pilcrow.
So there you have it. Love it or hate it, accept it or reject it, find it interesting or laugh at it. The reaction is up to you.
Once again, I very much look forward to any and all critical comments about my method, the grammatical or ungrammatical Greek reading of the text, etc. I have made an effort to be very clear in my above comments about exactly where any uncertainty or ambiguity in my method may lie. The critical comments about the first line by Koen, Rene, and Marco were very helpful to me in fixing and sharpening some weak points in my original interpretation, and I appreciate them very much. I welcome more such critical comments about the second line.