Judaeo-Greek reading of first three lines of f67r 1

[geoffreycaveney]

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.

But are you not saying that you can convert the Voynich MS text to Greek written in unpointed Hebrew?

If you don't have a clear view of what was done when the MS text was composed, you cannot convert it back.

So is this, or is this not something that could have been written in Judaeo-Greek:

[]ei[A]pan  tis  ipeirous  otan  skiiAis  tis  ,  epan  oAn
par'  Atous  &Atees  tAr(a)  oikous  o(u)k-eis(i)  tees  ,  tis  t-ei[A]pAs
shio  t-Aees  heAt-an  Atitoi  AlAs  ,  deit  vasAn  ,  fAs

There is such a thing, in language and in writing, as arbitrary or free variation in the writing of forms of words.

It was even much more prevalent in the time of the Voynich ms, before the printing press and the standardization of written word forms. But it continued to occur widely for centuries thereafter, such as in the actual spellings of word forms in the various surviving texts of Shakespeare's works. And it even continues to exist today, in less formal forms and contexts of writing, as opposed to the standardized form used in formal writing such as the messages that we write on a forum such as this one.

What philologists and paleographers do, in such a situation, is they use their experience and linguistic intuition and knowledge of the language, in order to determine the intended meaning and underlying forms that the actual written forms were intended to represent. This process cannot necessarily be reduced to an explicit set of rules that the author used to generate the text, and that the interpreter must determine and apply in reverse order to "convert the text back". Medieval manuscript writing didn't work that way. A lot of writing today still doesn't work that way.

Example: in casual informal writing such as is common on social media or in text messages today, there are many ways that American English speakers write and/or abbreviate the word "because". We don't always feel like writing out such a long word to express such a simple basic concept in a function word. In one post or comment or message or text, a person might write it "because", but in another he or she might write it "becos", and in other places the same person might write it "cos" or "cuz" or "coz" or " 'cause" or " 'cos". There is not necessarily an explicit rule that we can state to determine how this person will "convert" the word "because" into any one of these many forms in any given place in the text or at any given moment. So therefore we cannot determine an explicit rule to apply in order to take any given one of these forms that we find and "convert the text back" into "because".

Let's spell out the phonological and orthographic variety of just these half dozen or so informal forms of the word "because":

* The first syllable can be written or omitted entirely, or the writer can put an apostrophe in its place.

* The vowel in the second syllable can be written as "au" or "o" or "u".

* The last consonant can be written as "s" or "z".

* The silent final "e" can be written or omitted.

When I read such text, I don't use any set of rules to "convert the text back" to the word "because". I use my vast knowledge and experience as an English speaker and reader and writer to figure it out with my intuition.

Likewise, the author of the Voynich MS could have equally well written a given word in a variety of different ways and forms, and not necessarily according to any particular rule at any particular place in the text. The variation could have been arbitrary.

We will never identify a particular set of rules to convert such a text back into a more recognizable form of any standard language and its standardized written forms and spellings of words, which actually weren't so consistently standardized in practice, especially before the invention of the printing press.

Rather, we will have to use our experience and knowledge of the language and linguistic intuition to determine our best deduction for what each word form was most likely intended by the author to represent.

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So, to answer your question, yes I believe that text is something that could have been written in Judaeo-Greek. But the same content with the same or almost the same words could also have been written in dozens of other ways in Judaeo-Greek, just as the same three lines of content with almost the same words of colloquial American English in an early 21st century social media "text" could also be written in dozens of different ways.

In both cases, only our experience and linguistic intuition and knowledge of the language will enable us to attempt to interpret the meaning of the text, not a set of explicit rules to convert the text back into some standard form.

Of course, the task is many orders of magnitude more difficult with 15th century Judaeo-Greek, because we have a lot less knowledge about it, than we do about early 21st century American English!! 

But we have some knowledge. We have knowledge of classical Ancient Greek, and we have knowledge of Modern Greek, and we have some knowledge of forms of Byzantine Greek. We have a little knowledge of written Judaeo-Greek mainly from a later time period, and some knowledge of spoken Judaeo-Greek from a more recent period. We have the knowledge of the Hebrew script and how it works, and how it relates to pronunciation when the vowel diacritic dots are written and when they are not written. We have some medieval examples of Greek written in the Hebrew script, albeit very formal and a more standard form of Greek and only as a translation of one particular very formal text, the Hebrew Bible. And we have early modern examples of Judaeo-Greek written in the Hebrew script, albeit also very formal as a translation of the same text, the Bible. We then have a modest amount of more recent modern examples of Judaeo-Greek written in the Hebrew script.

Only by piecing together all of these clues and puzzle pieces, can we ever hope to be able to interpret such an idiosyncratic text as a manuscript written in late medieval early 15th century Judaeo-Greek, in an unknown script that appears to be akin to unpointed Hebrew in terms of its representation of the language, and which uses a typically Byzantine Greek mixture of classical Greek and more modern Greek forms. There is no existing textbook or collection of documents to study that particular form of the language! We just have to use all the possible clues we can find, from all the stages and forms of the language that we can study, and try to piece the puzzle together.

I hope that the exercise in my new post today on "9-phoneme Greek text representation" is also useful in helping us to get a handle on the Voynich form of this quasi-Judaeo-Greek. During the time that I was writing this comment in reply to you, Don has already shown that a knowledgeable Greek reader/speaker can read and comprehend such a Greek text, even without any distinction made between t/th/d, k/kh/g, or p/ph/b; or between i/y/e; and with "n" and "r" exclusively in final positions, and "m" and "l" exclusively in non-final positions. This tells me that a knowledgeable Greek reader/speaker could also have been able to read the Voynich script form of Greek as I interpret it, which also lacks these same kinds of distinctions.