geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

The most common words in the Voynich text are:

daiin
ol
Chedy
aiin
Shedy
chol
or
ar
Chey
dar
qokeey
qokeedy
Shey
qokedy
dy

I would be grateful if you could give your readings of these words and their meanings.

Of course, as I noted to begin my original post, this conjecture must remain tentative and speculative at our present stage of very low knowledge of the text.

But sure, I'll give you some of my conjectures about possible readings for the most common words in your list:

[daiin] : "pan-" where the ms text represents Greek, "van" where it represents a Romance language ("-van" or "-ban" can also be the suffix of many Romance 3rd person plural verb forms, especially in the past or imperfect tenses)

[ol] : the suffix "-on" or "-os", depending on which hypothesis one chooses for [l]. Both are extremely common suffixes in Greek, and in some Romance languages as well. If we can read the vowel as "-un" or "-us", a very natural linguistic variation, that creates even more possible suffixes that this word could represent.

[chedy] : the suffix "-ius" or "-eus". [ch] may be the glide /j/, or the letter "h" which is silent in most of these languages. Actually, it could also be "-ibus" with my theories about [d] -- now it's starting to look like Latin after all!

[aiin] : "-an", a ubiquitous suffix in many languages. Also the Greek particle "an" meaning "if". If more word play is involved here, it could also represent the even more ubiquitous Greek subjunctive particle "na", the most common single word in Modern Greek.

[shedy] : I believe there are multiple forms of the Voynich character we transcribe as "[sh]". The most frequent form is the one I interpret as Greek "t" in the 1st line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1 in the original post. This gives [shedy] = "-tius" or "-teus", or possibly "-tivus" or "-tibus". Again, these are starting to look more like Latin suffixes than I had expected. 

I also believe an alternate form of [sh] may represent the phoneme /m/, which I think must be represented in the text somehow. In these cases, [shedy] = "-mius", "-mivus", "-mibus", or "meus". Looks very much like Latin again.

[chol] : "-ion" or "-ios", again depending on the hypothesis for [l]. We sure are getting a lot of very common Latin and Greek suffixes in this list.

[or] : "-or". Also a very common Latin suffix.

[ar] : "-ar" or "al". I believe the only way to account for the underlying language(s)' entire phonemic inventory may be for the script to represent the liquids "r" and "l" both with the same character [r].

[chey] : "-ies". Another common suffix.

[dar] : "var-", "val-", and various others. Speaking of "various", I can write it in Voynichese as [dar chody].

[qokeey] : Well now these words depend on one's theory about [q]. I tend to think it must be an ampersand. Now about [k]. This is an open question in the hypothesis in this post, since [k] did not occur in the line I transcribed. But I tend to think it is part of the series of stops with [t] = /k/, /g/ and [p] = /p/, /b/, so I suspect that [k] = /t/, /d/, and [s] and [sh] are simply alternate ways to write /t/ or /d/. 
Given all of these suppositions, I propose that [qokeey] = "& autes", Greek for "and they", "and these", "and those" (feminine plural). In the bathing women section of the ms, the frequent repetition of these feminine plural pronouns would make a lot of grammatical sense. It seems natural enough to me to represent the Greek diphthong "au" simply as "o"=[o].

[qokeedy] : "& auteeus". Perhaps the vowels need to be slightly re-interpreted here to make the Greek ending grammatical. I still suspect that this is also another form of the same Greek pronoun as [qokeey].

[shey] : "tis" a form of the Greek definite article, as seen twice in my interpretation of the 1st line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1. The letter sequence "-tis" could also occur in many other places in both Greek and Latin.

[qokedy] : See [qokeedy] above.

[dy] : "-us", perhaps the most frequent suffix in Latin. (I mentioned elsewhere the hypothesis that the Currier A scribe just used [-y] to express "-us", akin to the medieval Latin ms abbreviation, but the Currier B scribe chose to write the letter "u" separately, as [d], producing the common suffix [-dy] in the B text but not in the A text.)

This has been a most interesting exercise. Thank you for the challenging request that prompted me to work through each of these words/vords/suffixes systematically.

Geoffrey Caveney