geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Re the word "iris" appearing uniquely near a plant with a blue flower: do you realize how many blue flowers there are in the MS? It's a colour choice many times more problematic than the green water.

On the nature of the opening sentence, this is the kind of content so many aspiring translators get. An apparently philosophical or mystical collection of nouns and verbs devoid of most grammar.

Our problem is that our native languages are very analytical. One word, one bit if meaning. Much of our grammar is expressed in little function words. But Greek was much more synthetic. They actually needed those endings. For us, it feels like no big deal to drop them, but for them it woukd have been.

Again, Judaeo-Greek is different. I attach a photo of a page of Judaeo-Greek text: it is from a book (with parallel Hebrew text on its right) that I saw on display at the Romaniote Greek Jewish synagogue in New York City this weekend. You see that the vowel diacritic dots are not written at all. To take one simple example, on this page the word with Hebrew letters qoph+yod, "qy", occurs several times. It must represent Greek "kai". There is no written indication of the "a" in "kai" at all. Readers just had to know the language and figure it out.

Now this is just one example, probably from the early 20th century. I'm sure there were many different ways to write Judaeo-Greek in the Hebrew script, and who knows exactly how people would have written it, before the printing press, in the early 15th century? We know it was written, but we don't have any surviving examples of it from before the 16th century. I would bet that the expression of Greek in the Hebrew script in late medieval letters, manuscripts, etc., in fact, if anything, left out more phonetic and grammatical information than the 20th century text here does.

And on top of that, we have the distinct possibility that the author deliberately intended to make the writing obscure and difficult to read. That is the only reason I can think of, that he would "compress" the consonant inventory so that each character stands for two or three related Greek consonants (l/r, m/n, t/th/d, etc.). If he did that, wouldn't it also make sense for him to omit many final vowels as well?

Geoffrey