geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[-JKP-]

Years ago when I was trying to resolve the VMS text into a long list of languages one by one, I didn't know about Judeo-Greek (I tried Ladino, Yiddish, etc., but somehow, even though I was looking for different adaptations of Jewish languages, I missed Judeo-Greek).

Not knowing about Judeo-Greek, I was simply trying Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, Greek, Amharic, Latin, Estonian, Icelandic, Persian, etc., as separate languages.

So, trying for just Greek, I would get things like this (I had to dig through my files to find these, it's so long ago):

υαερτα γουαρίς υαρίς (or maybe υερίς) ωτορ οχς

I didn't treat the VMS text as an abjad even though it has always struck me as maybe having abjadic qualities, I was simply trying various substitution schemes. No extra characters were added, this is straight Voynichese (I'm not going to say which folio it's from, yet).


On the surface, it almost looks like Greek and can almost be read as Greek (I didn't even tweak this to try to make it work better), and it wasn't too hard to get phrases like this that were almost a line long, but when one looks at it more closely, it didn't strike me as legitimate Greek (with my very limited acquaintance of Greek).

Also, there were chunks in between these phrases that didn't seem to make any sense at all.