geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

The issue I try to point out can also be formulated in this way. Just to translate a half sentence of less than ten words, you need an inconsistent approach and a great deal of explaining.

The linear-B comparison is not valid for several reasons (you already pointed out one or them).

Iotacism (I never heard of the word but know how to pronounce modern Greek) is also not a good parallel, because the writing was not affected by it. And when you write 'e' you have not yet distinguished between epsilon and eta, and only one of the two is now pronounced 'i'.

You say "the writing was not affected by it". But consider the case of Judaeo-Greek, written in the Hebrew script. This is not something I made up, this is a major medieval language with a long and rich history: 
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"The Jews have a place of note in the history of Modern Greek. They were unaffected by Atticism and employed the current colloquial vernacular which they then transcribed in Hebrew letters."
I know it is hard to believe for us today, after over 500 years of printed material as part of our literary culture, but in the early 15th century people had literally never seen a printed word or letter in their lives. All writing was in manuscripts. People, even cultured educated literate people, were not bombarded with printed text in front of their eyes, not in any form of media, not even in books. The books of the time literally looked like those now inscrutable (to us) medieval Latin ms with all the messy abbreviations everywhere. That was the only form of writing people had ever seen as of the early 15th century. 
Greek Jews wrote Greek in the Hebrew script because it was the only script they knew. Many of them had probably literally never read a Greek text in the Greek alphabet in their lives, even though they spoke a form of the Greek language.
So they had no idea what was an "epsilon" and what was an "eta" and what was a "iota", and so on. They just wrote down the colloquial language they heard and spoke, and they rendered it in their own Hebrew script as best they could.
Thus, the Greek alphabet spelling of words, at any historical stage of the language, is irrelevant to my hypothesis if the author was a Greek Jew writing in Judaeo-Greek. In this case we would expect the text to look like colloquial late medieval / Byzantine Greek spelled phonetically.
So everything that was a "iota", or an "eta", or an "epsilon-iota" diphthong, or an "omicron-iota" diphthong, or an "upsilon", or an "upsilon-iota" diphthong in the Greek script -- all of those would have been written exactly the same in Judaeo-Greek, because they were all pronounced the same, as /i/.