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

I must apologize for and correct a mistake here. After more careful reading of the attached text, I now see that the left side of the parallel text is written in Judaeo-Spanish, not Judaeo-Greek. It is written in the "Rashi script" form of the Hebrew script. For example, at the bottom of the page you will see a phrase repeated several times both in Hebrew and in Judaeo-Spanish. Transliterating, in Hebrew it is "k-l  y-m-y  H-y-y-k", meaning "all the days of your life". The same repeated phrase on the left side reads "T-w-d-w-s  d-y-A-s  d-y-T-w-s  b-y-d-A-s". Notice that the shapes of the letters in the Rashi script are in some cases very different from their shapes in the standard Hebrew script. (In particular here, Teth, samekh, aleph, and beth.) This phrase must of course be Judaeo-Spanish: "todos dias de-tus vidas". Many Spanish Jews moved to Greece after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which explains the existence of Judaeo-Spanish texts in the Greek Jewish community. The word "q-y" must be Spanish "que".

The point about the ambiguity of the vowels still stands, even in Judaeo-Spanish: Spanish "u" and "o" are both written with Hebrew Rashi script "vav" ("w"), and Spanish "i" and "e" are both written with Hebrew Rashi script "yod" ("y"). Further, the point still stands that we may expect a 15th century handwritten ms to be even more ambiguous about the vowels than this much more recent printed text is, and of course there remains the point that the ms author may well have deliberately made the script more ambiguous than standard text in the language it was written in.

I know the joke here is going to be, "So Geoffrey, are you sure that the Voynich ms isn't also written in Judaeo-Spanish rather than Judaeo-Greek?" No, I do not read any Judaeo-Spanish text in the Voynich ms. In the case of the attached text, it took me one phrase of a few words to realize and correct my mistake and identify the language. In the case of the Voynich ms, I have read and interpreted many lines of text on several different pages, and all I see so far is Greek. If I came across a phrase that my letter correspondence system read as "tudus diAs ditus bidAs" (I can even give you a Voynich equivalent: [shokody keey shekody dcheky]), I would recognize the presence of Spanish in the text and say so. So far, I have not. I actually strongly considered the hypothesis of a mixed Greek / Romance language text, but evidence of a Romance language in the text has not been forthcoming. Again, there is nothing in my letter correspondence system that prevents such a reading or that requires the ms text to be read as Greek. Greek is simply what I have found.

Geoffrey