From "decryption" to "translation"

[geoffreycaveney]

Another operator that would be needed in a text is "of". Given how the MS begins: "Fachys ykal ar ytaiin", I wonder whether "y" might be candidate for that, because an annotation such as "Book of kal and of taiin...." would appear just natural, in fact in the old times it was common for a book's title to be quite lengthy, representing in fact its annotation.

I will have to read and consider your long preceding post more carefully, in order to respond with an intelligent analysis. But I have a few brief comments here for now:

The first line doesn't look like a title to me. It just looks like the beginning of the first paragraph. What does stand out is the one word at the end of the paragraph, separated to the right side (right justified) of the last line. This looks very much like the "attribution" stating the name of the person at the end of a quote. To me, the first page looks very much like a series of four quotes, as one often finds on the introductory page of a major work or ms.

I read the fourth word as "ataiin" rather than "ytaiin". It is not clear, as the bottom of the letter is obscured and also it runs into the tall gallows "k" in the line below.

I interpret "y" as Greek "s", and as a prefix it may often represent the common Greek preposition "se" or "s' ", meaning "to, at, by, in, on, onto, upon". This word is often prefixed to the following word as a contraction, often a following article. Thus we have "sten"/"stin", "ston", "stou", "stous", "ste"/"sti", "stes"/"stis", "sto", "sta". All of these forms can mean "to the", "in the", "by the", "on the", etc., with the following word in different grammatical cases, genders, and numbers, thus changing the form of the article.

In the case of "ykal", I read it as "stas" or "stes" or "stous", or if the [l] proves to be "n", then it would be "stan" or "sten" or "ston". (Once again, coming from the Judaeo-Greek literary tradition in the Hebrew script, the vowels would be ambiguous in this way, when the vowel diacritic dots are not written.)

In Greek "of" is not a single word, because it uses the genitive case to express the concept -- like Russian!

But in any case, the Greek definite article would be ubiquitous, and it can be "o" (masculine nominative singular), "oi" (masc. or fem. nom. plural), "e"/"i" (fem. nom. sing.), or it can begin with "t-" (all other forms).

The Voynich "o" prefix can definitely be the Greek nominative singular masculine definite article, or the Greek nominative plural article.

I believe the author used both "k" and "s" and sometimes "sh" to represent Greek "t" or "d" or "th". The "s" by itself or as a prefix would likely be one of the Greek article forms.