geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Rene in the "Successful translation ?" thread stated that a proposed solution should include letter/character correspondence tables showing how the original encryption steps were done.

I described the details, reasons, phonological, orthographic, and historical explanations for most of the encryption process in a previous post in the current thread, at this link:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Now I have created a Greek : Judaeo-Greek : Voynich letter correspondence table to present to readers of this forum.

The previous post linked above should be considered as essentially a set of footnotes to this table.

One very important detail not included in the previous post: the explanation of the Voynich character [ch]. 

First, Voynich [ch] represents the Judaeo-Greek Hebrew letter "he" ("h"). Greek has never had a letter for the "h" sound, but sometimes pronounced it before word-initial vowels. 

Second, [ch] must be considered as an alternate character for [e]. (Also, [i] is a much rarer alternate character for [e].) The author encrypted Greek iota or Judaeo-Greek yod as either of these characters. For example, in word-initial position, the author almost always used [ch] rather than [e]. (This is consistent with the Greek "h" sound before an initial vowel!) If you have studied some hard-to-read characters and words in the Voynich MS, you have probably found instances where it is hard to tell whether a character is [ch] or [ee] (that is, connected or unconnected). The relationship of [e] and [ch] proposed here is consistent with this orthographic ambiguity in the ms text.

Since Judaeo-Greek also sometimes wrote yod for Greek upsilon, eta, and epsilon, these letters may be encrypted as either [e] or [ch] as well.

Also, if you know that the popular Greek food "gyro" is pronounced "euro" or "yiro", then you know about the sound change of Greek "g" > "y". Likewise, in my reading of the Dionysian term "sparagmos" as the last word (right-justified) at the end of the first paragraph, for example, the Greek "g" is represented only by a Voynich [i]. This reflects a "y" pronunciation rather than the "g" Greek spelling.

One other minor change from the previous post: the interpretation of the Voynich character [f] is difficult because it is so rare, but the correspondence table shows that the encryption process is more consistent if Judaeo-Greek "b" rather than Judaeo-Greek "ph" is the letter sometimes represented by Voynich [f]. In any case, [p] is more common, and as I explained in detail in the previous post, in most places in the ms this whole series of labial consonants became Voynich [d], due to the identical pronunciation of the Judaeo-Greek letters "beth/veth" and "vav" as the sound "v".

=====

General comment on this correspondence table: Notice how the second step, from Judaeo-Greek to Voynich, is not actually any more convoluted than the first step from Greek to Judaeo-Greek (without the vowel diacritic dots written, that is). And the first step from Greek to Judaeo-Greek is a known and established historical linguistic fact, not just a part of my theory! This table shows that once one has made the step from Greek to Judaeo-Greek, it is not such a giant leap to make the additional step from Judaeo-Greek to Voynich. Yes, the consonants are further ambiguated. But plenty of letters were already ambiguated going from Greek to Judaeo-Greek!

I already thoroughly explained the reasons for the ambiguation of Greek vowels in Judaeo-Greek without diacritic dots. But the reader should also note certain ambiguation of Greek consonants in Judaeo-Greek as well:

Hebrew never had separate letters for the fricative sounds "kh" (/x/), "th", and "ph" (/f/). Historically, the Hebrew letter "chet" had represented a pharyngeal or uvular fricative, not the velar fricative /x/ that speakers of European languages are more familiar with. In Hebrew, these fricative sounds are just allophonic alternative pronunciations of "k", "t", and "p" in certain places, particularly in medial and sometimes in final position. (It is likely that Hebrew borrowed this alternation from Aramaic.) So in Hebrew, the voiceless stop and the fricative are written with the same letter.

But in Greek, the distinction between "k" and "kh" (usually written as "ch" in Latin letter borrowings), "t" and "th", and "p" and "ph" is phonemic: the distinction is important in distinguishing meaning between different roots and words. When Judaeo-Greek speakers wrote their Greek language in their Hebrew script, they had no natural way to make these distinctions with separate letters, since Hebrew lacked letters for the fricatives. Thus in Judaeo-Greek, as the table shows, you see the Hebrew letter "kaf" representing both Greek kappa and Greek chi; the Hebrew letter "tav" representing both Greek tau and Greek theta; and the Hebrew letter "pe" representing both Greek pi and Greek phi. Now the Judaeo-Greeks did also adapt the letter "qof" for kappa sometimes, and the letter "chet" for chi sometimes, and the letter "teth" for tau sometimes. But nevertheless, the ambiguity of "kaf", "tav", and "pe" remained, as the table reflects.

Thus, some of the ambiguity in consonants that I identify in the Voynich script, may have had its roots in this certain measure of ambiguity created by representing Greek with the Hebrew script in Judaeo-Greek. Naturally, it is clear that the Voynich ms author added more ambiguity.

So then, without further ado, I present to readers of this forum the Greek : Judaeo-Greek : Voynich letter correspondence table:

   

-----
Geoffrey Caveney