Judaeo-Greek reading of first three lines of f67r 1

[geoffreycaveney]

Geoffrey,

a fundamental point in your approach is not clear to me.

Are you saying that the Voynich MS is based on a piece of written text, that used unpointed Hebrew to write Greek?

If so, your second rendition of the text, which you call "my Judaeo-Greek interpretation" is the most important part, because this is what the source MS would have said. It should be very close to "real" Judaeo Greek, allowing for the occasional mistake.

If not, what happened? How was it done?

Rene,

Thank you for the good question.

I do not know if the MS was based on another piece of written text. It could have been based on another piece of Judaeo-Greek text, or it could have been the author's own composition. It could have been an attempt to put into writing some poetry that the author knew only from an oral tradition. There are other possibilities, for example that it was a translation of another text from Hebrew or another language, but these are less likely in my opinion.

Scholars do not have a large number of primary source documents of medieval Judaeo-Greek. We know it existed, we know the Greek-speaking Jewish community in the Eastern Mediterranean goes back thousands of years. There is a Greek reference to a Greek Jew dating back to the 3rd century BCE. 

But there is not a lot of surviving evidence of *written* Judaeo-Greek going very far back in history. There are medieval Greek translations in Hebrew script of the Hebrew Bible, as documented on the website "The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Then there is a printed work of the Bible published in 1547 in Hebrew, Judaeo-Spanish, and Judaeo-Greek. It is not clear to me whether any medieval written manuscripts in Judaeo-Greek (as opposed to Greek translations in Hebrew script) from before the invention of the printing press have survived.

In general, medieval Greek Jews spoke (Judaeo-)Greek, but read and wrote in Hebrew. Their written literary tradition was in Hebrew in the Hebrew script. As such, since their spoken language tended not to be written, there could very well have been some oral traditions in spoken Judaeo-Greek that rarely if ever got written down. The lines of poetry I interpret here could have been an attempt to put some of this in writing in a language that the author had never seen in written form before. On the other hand, it could have just been the original composition of the author, perhaps of uneven quality.

I should note that there are a number of archaic classical Greek forms in my lines of interpretation, interspersed with more modern medieval forms. This was typical of Byzantine Greek. If my interpretation is correct, the author must have had some awareness of such forms. But again, this awareness could still have come from a spoken and oral exposure to such work (hearing Byzantine poetry), not necessarily from a familiarity with any written Greek works in the Greek script. Once again, please keep in mind that at the time of the Voynich MS, printed works did not exist. If you didn't have access to manuscripts, you didn't see the written form of the script.

I should also mention another possible explanation for Greek to be written in such a strange script that represents its phonology so poorly. Although Constantinople did not fall until 1453, large parts of Greece itself fell under Ottoman rule well before that date, as early as the late 14th century and early 15th century. If the Greek population was being repressed at that time, it is possible that someone attempted to hide Greek texts by writing them in a different script that authorities might not recognize as Greek. Perhaps in this case the script was deliberately designed to render Greek more ambiguously, so that it would be more difficult to identify as Greek. (If so, they sure did succeed in that aim!) Of course this is a speculative theory, and it is not my main hypothesis. But we must remain open to various possible explanations for the script of the MS text.

Note that an accidentally ambiguous [a] or [o] character representing the Hebrew letters aleph or ayin in Judaeo-Greek, and a deliberately ambiguous [a] or [o] character in a script that was designed to be difficult to identify, may amount to and look like almost the same thing in practice in the interpretation of the text.

On the other hand, there were also Greek Jews living in Italy at the time -- mainly southern Italy, but some had moved to northern Italy -- who could have written a MS such as this one. My focus is on the language of the MS text, and I cannot claim to be a specialist in the origin or provenance of the MS. I am agnostic on that issue until I have additional evidence.

It could be an interesting exercise to take the medieval Greek and early modern Judaeo-Greek Bible translations in Hebrew script, take unpointed versions of them, and test them for entropy, conditional entropy, character pair distribution plots, etc. Of course it would be a lot of work to prepare such texts for this exercise. Further, I am aware that my interpretation of the Voynich MS further simplifies the script by its lack of distinction between voiced and voiceless consonant pairs. (But to be fair, the phonetic status of the voiced sounds /b/, /d/, /g/ was unclear at this intermediate stage of Greek.) But it would still be an interesting exercise.

Geoffrey