geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

I'm sorry to say, but this proposal shows all the classical signs of an incorrect solution:

- the translation table from Voynich text to plain text is vague and inconsistent
- the resulting plain text still has to be adapted in order to obtain real words
- the then resulting text is not grammatically sensible.
- the word patterns / low entropy are not explained.

One of the typical problems is that the 'translation' concentrates on the decryption part rather than on the encryption part. It is completely natural to map certain Voynich characters to different plain text characters  in order to get some meaningful words out of it. However, this means that the person doing the encryption would have mapped several different plain text characters onto the same code character, which is not at all a natural thing to do.

There is yet another, very clear sign that one is working on the basis of an incorrect assumption.
This is that one needs more and more "degrees of freedom" as one tries to translate more text.

The "rules" that were defined to translate 10 words cannot be used to translate the next ten words, and more changes, and expansions of choices are needed. A single Voynich character needs to be mapped to ever more plaintext characters.

Also, I think that you know this already. If I may quote from your very first post:

It is not enough to propose deciphering of individual isolated words and names and labels. It is not difficult to do that with a handful of isolated words and letter values for the characters in them. The problem is, if you then continue with the rest of the characters, and the letters in the alphabet of the target language, you will quickly run out of characters, and many consonants in your target language will go entirely unrepresented in the Voynich ms character text.

As a test, try expressing *one whole paragraph* in the text - any paragraph you like! - with your deciphering system. You will likely find that it comes out far too repetitive, with far too few letters repeated far too frequently, and far too many other letters missing entirely. It will not look like actual writing in an actual language at all.

Rene,

The whole reason I think I'm onto something, is that I do *not* see the need for "more and more degrees of freedom" as I translate more text. I am able to stick to the same rules and keep interpreting more text. The one time I made a significant change, in the interpretation of the Voynich character [l] as Greek "m/n" rather than Greek "s", I went back and identified every place in my previous interpretations where the change would affect them, and provided an analysis and explanation of each one.

Yes, the one letter in "Ham" is wrong, as far as I can tell so far. One letter. That is the *only* "expansion" of the degrees of freedom, if you like, of my original set of correspondences. I would rather simply say that this one letter appears to be wrong. This is not at all the same thing as "more changes, and expansions of choices are needed. A single Voynich character needs to be mapped to ever more plaintext characters". This is exactly what I have *not* had to do as I proceed from one excerpt to another.

And yes, I believe the 4-line poem qualifies as "one whole paragraph" of text, and I believe it is actually not so repetitive, does not have too few letters repeated too frequently, and does not have too many letters missing entirely. And I believe it does look like actual writing in an actual language. I would not be posting my interpretations if I did not believe they met these standards.

Yes, there are inherent ambiguities in the system, in the vowel qualities and in the voiced/voiceless pairs, r/l, m/n. It is just like Koen said in another thread: "One of the very few ways I can imagine the VM text containing meaning is if a language were somehow made phonetically poorer, the phoneme inventory flattened. Similar sounds merged." This is *exactly* what my quasi-Judaeo-Greek correspondence system does. Exactly! It is a very precise and accurate summary of my system, in fact.

But I have kept this whole set of merged similar sounds *consistent* throughout all of my readings and translations and interpretations. Except for the one letter "m" in "Ham". That is it. I could propose some sort of explanation for this one letter, but for now I think it makes more sense to simply say, "I have read and interpreted a 4-line poem on one page, a majority of a set of 12 related red labels on another page, a plausible interpretation of the daily labels in the individual Zodiac month/day charts, and the set of labels on the T-O map on another page. Out of all of that, the only true 'inconsistency' in the system is the one letter 'm' in 'Ham'." So I will just leave this letter as an unresolved issue for now, without throwing out the whole system that has worked for everything else so far.

Geoffrey