geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[-JKP-]

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Detail notes on the provisional system of phoneme values for characters here:

[t] can be /k/ or /g/
[s] and [sh] are /t/  This is very logical for Greek since the common single-character word [s] could be the definite article forms "to", "tou", ta", abbreviated as "t' ".
[y] is /s/

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y is virtually always at the beginnings or ends of tokens (or standalone).

If you assign phonemes to Voynich glyphs, you would have to account for why a letter as common as "s" (if represented by y) is found only at the beginnings and ends. In other words, you have to resolve the issue of spaces between tokens and even if the spaces are taken with a grain of salt, the positionality of y is still highly significant (and not distributed within words as they are in Greek).

There are several possible explanations:

1) Given the general tendency toward uniformity in Voynich ms text "word" length, it is plausible that many syllables are written as separate words. If so, many more "s's" will occur at the beginnings or ends of "words" than if the syllables were all written together as words in the standard forms that we are familiar with.

I'm open to the possibility that Voynichese is text that has been broken into syllables (or in which the spaces are not necessarily literal). I've suggested the idea of syllables a few times (the suggestion didn't get a very good reception but I still consider it a possibility). If we break these into syllables

Καλησπέρα   [b]Κα λη σπέ ρα
Ευχαριστώ    [b]Ευ χα ρισ τώ
Ασπρο πάτο  [b]Ασ προ πά το

the "s" appears at the beginning in the first example, and at the end, in the second and third examples, but note the great variation of letters that precede and follow the "s" if you do this with a list of words. This doesn't happen in Voynichese.

3) Elsewhere we have discussed the idea that [y] looks like the medieval Latin ms abbreviation symbol for "-us", etc. Perhaps the Voynich scribe adopted it for a broader variety of letter sequences, such that [y] could also represent the final sequence "-si" in Greek "etsi" for example, or also such that [y] could represent the initial sequence "eis-" in Greek "eiste" (or "es-" in Old French "estont", etc.). Basically, this would mean that the scribe did not write any vowel occurring before "s" at the beginning of a word, or after "s" at the end of a word. Such a thing sounds strange to us, but it would not seem all that unusual in the highly abbreviated world of medieval ms writing before the invention of movable type and the printing press.

I've written quite a few blogs about this, so obviously I don't disagree that y might stand for a sequence of letters (might be an abbreviation) and that the expansion might differ depending on whether it's at the beginning or the end (as in Latin).

4) It is possible that another character, such as [l], also represents "s". I do not prefer this solution, since it means one less character available to represent another phoneme. (I would prefer to have [l] represent "n", for example, so that "n" could sometimes occur in other positions than word-final, as it must when represented as [n].) But the character [l] does not occur in the particular line of text that I transcribe in this post, so with this hypothesis it remains an open questions what the phonemic value of [l] may be.

I'm not too thrilled about this explanation either. The VMS character set is already very constrained, with a small proportion of the glyphs representing the majority of the text. Compressing it further seems untenable.



I wish I had more time to respond to this, but I have to go. I have some important deadlines.