From "decryption" to "translation"

[geoffreycaveney]

Yes, that's what I was writing back in 2015 of otol.

So otol appears to be a widely used notion, suitable for the following applications:

• serving as the name of some quite important celestial object;
  
• possibly also serving as morphological part of other star names;
  
• possibly serving for a certain generalization;
  
• serving for description (direct or by means of association) of a number of unidentified objects: anatomic/distillation (?), leaf/root of some plant (?);
  
• possibly serving as morphological part of description (direct or by means of association) of "personified" objects in the Zodiac pages.
  

What celestial body (Sun and Moon excluded) in what language could serve so many purposes at once? If a positive answer to this question is given, then that would be the confirmation of H5, let alone a huge advance in the Voynich research. If no valid candidates are discovered, it would be worthwile to re-consider H5 and look at some other system instead of "stars".

(Here "H5" stands for the hypothesis that star labels are star names).

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One may call it "the otol test"

Researchers are exceedingly welcome to propose solutions to it.

Anton, if you have managed to read through all the details of my hypothesis in the "Greek You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1" thread, you may be aware that I believe the language of the ms may be Greek, but in the form of Judaeo-Greek, that is, written similarly to the way it was written in the Hebrew script. Unfortunately, the Hebrew script was not well-suited to the Greek language, in particular to all of the Greek vowels. Even worse, writers using the Hebrew script often omitted the vowel diacritic dots, making any Judaeo-Greek text even more ambiguous. I believe this may be the kind of thing we are dealing with in the Voynich ms.

So unfortunately, in the word [otol], I believe the character [o] might represent "o" or "a" or "au" in Judaeo-Greek. Also unfortunately, I'm afraid the Voynich script did not even distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonant pairs, so the character [t] might represent "k" or "g" in Judaeo-Greek. Finally, [l] is one of the most difficult characters for me to determine in my hypothesis: I think it is likely to be "n" or "s" (either one or the other, not both), but I cannot be completely sure which one it is yet.

Let us suppose that [l] represents "n". In this case under my hypothesis [otol] could represent any of the following things in Judaeo-Greek:

"okon"
"ogon"
"okan"
"ogan"
"okaun"
"ogaun"
"akan"
"agan"
"akon"
"agon"
"akaun"
"agaun"
"aukon"
"augon"
"aukan"
"augan"
"aukaun"
"augaun"

Even more ambiguously, in the Hebrew script there could have been an additional final vowel, which might not have been indicated in the script at all, if vowel diacritic dots were not written. So you could add a final vowel to any of the above words, and in this kind of script, it still could have been written [otol] !

Alternatively, if [l] represents "s" rather than "n", one can repeat the above list, replacing "n" with "s" in each word. Also, an additional final vowel could be added to any of the words in this case as well.