geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

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.