geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

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?

How can you be 100% sure that Ars is not "Iris"? What if the text is saying something slightly different from what you expect? What do you know of what was meaningful to the author?
You freely pick up meanings on the basis of what seems more likely to you. If the writer would have wanted to say that your thorsos wants Iris, he would have had no way to write it. Anything with r-s in it must be "eros", because you have decided that the context is such and such.

With all these degrees of freedom, you can do whatever you want. You can only do whatever you want. You make up the context, you make up the meaning. Maybe ars means eros because tors means thursos, or maybe ars means ouros because tors means theritos; this is your creative writing game. But if all you need is that the manuscript tells you that "a solitary thursos wants love", go with it. A manuscript that begins with as meaningful a question as "Is the mouth a form only?" will certainly be full of just as meaningful answers.

Regarding quasi-Judaeo-Greek "Ars" as Greek "Iris": Greek iota is actually the one Greek vowel that *does* have a more or less clear analogue in the Hebrew script, yod, which I believe the author encrypted as Voynich [e] or sometimes part of [ch]. (Honestly, it is often difficult to tell in certain less legible parts of the MS, whether a particular glyph should be read [ch] or [ee]. More precisely, in my description of the encryption steps, I would state that Hebrew he and chet ("h" letters) -> Voynich [ch], and Hebrew yod -> Voynich [e], but then as a secondary step, in some cases the author chose to encrypt Hebrew yod with the alternate character [ch], or as part of [ch].)

Since [e] and [ch] are entirely absent from the Voynich word, [ory], I would consider "Iris" a *much* less plausible original Greek meaning than "eros". If the writer would have wanted to say that his (not my) thorsos wants Iris, he would have been able to write it [cheory], or [chory], or even [chorchy]. Actually, guess what, that last word [chorchy] occurs exactly once in the Voynich MS text: on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Might the plant with the blue flower there perhaps look a little bit like...an iris? It's just an idea. 

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theritos is not a very likely or plausible interpretation of tors, because there is no second "t" in tors. Whereas with thursos, we have the repetition of the s's as consecutive consonants. It is much more natural to expect the author not to necessarily write the double "s" in this case, especially since [y] shows many signs of occasional use as a more generic word ending abbreviation character, like the medieval Latin ms "9" symbol.

Yes, the beginning question "Is the mouth a form only?" is rather obscure, I admit. But keep in mind we may be dealing with Dionysian and/or Kabbalistic material here. Are you familar with the seminal medieval Kabbalistic text, the Zohar?

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As the link notes, "The Zohar is mostly written in what has been described as a cryptic, obscure style of Aramaic."

Likewise, here in the Voynich MS text, might we not be sometimes dealing with a "cryptic, obscure style of Judaeo-Greek"?

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In any case, I'm very glad we are having this discussion. I'm very interested in this possible plant identification word [chorchy] = "iris" on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . I never would have been able to think of and pick out that word myself any time soon, with all the leads I'm exploring and all the discussions I'm attempting to keep up with here. Thank you for bringing up the word "Iris" in our discussion, so that I was prompted to think about its logical Voynich word structure in my system, search for it, and find it uniquely occurring on a page with a plant illustration with a blue flower. I will be sure to add this to the evidence for the Judaeo-Greek hypothesis.

Geoffrey