geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Hi Geoffrey,
I have asked the admins to move here your post in "Successful translation": it will be more convenient for both threads.

From what you write, I understand the ambiguity of your system is OK for you, as well as the ungrammaticality of the nominative "eros" appearing instead of the accusative.  

The obvious question is: of all the many thousands of ungrammatical sentences that would have matched the consonants in your "first step", why did you choose the one that you interpret as "a solitary thursos wants love"? Why is this particular sentence meaningful to you?

My response in the "Successful translation ?" thread was a direct reply to Rene's original post, representing my attempt to describe exactly the steps that Rene said were necessary for any proposed solution: to explain the original encryption steps. I did so, with much detail about both Greek and Hebrew and Judaeo-Greek linguistics to back it up. I do not see how anyone can claim that is hijacking a thread or not directly relevant to the topic of the thread and the original post. At the very least, there should be a note and a link placed there, so that all readers of the "Successful translation ?" thread can see that I replied in detail, and can be directed to a link that they can click on to read my response and my summary explanation, and evaluate it for themselves.

About the nominative/accusative eros, I certainly considered that carefully in my original reading and interpretation before I posted it here. In modern Greek, eros is also the accusative singular:

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(Click on "show" in the "Declension of eros" box. You will see that the accusative is also eros.)

I strongly suspect it was also used that way in spoken colloquial Greek and in Judaeo-Greek by the 15th century. (Not all of these things are documented when it comes to colloquial Greek, as the "prestige" writing style was to use as many classical forms as possible.)

Regarding why a particular interpretation may be the most likely among many in an ambiguous writing system or cipher: It all depends on the context of the surrounding text, and what is most likely to be meaningful to the author (not what is meaningful to me or to you). In this case, I already had the following readings before interpreting this clause: reading of the "attribution" label at the end of the paragraph as "sparagmos" ; reading of the related word "thursos" in the immediately preceding clause ; reading of a semantically related verb after "thursos" in the immediately preceding clause ; reading of another Greek word for "love" with a different connotation in the immediately preceding clause. That is a significant number of context clues, is it not?

As for the word "monos", this one is actually not so terribly ambiguous. To me it is by far the most obvious Greek word to be likely to occur here with the structure m/n+V+m/n+V+s. You cannot make such a long list for this one as you could for "eros". The "s" on the end means that it is likely a masculine nominative singular form modifying "thursos", rather than an adverb like "mono", without the "s", such as we found in the first question clause of the paragraph.

Geoffrey