geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

One important point to add:

For those who are familiar with Voynich word structure, it will quickly become clear from a brief overview of the table that with this correspondence system, very few Voynich words will end with the equivalent of a Greek vowel. At first glance, this seems implausible, since so many Greek words end in vowels. However, there are at least two logical explanations for this:

1) The obvious one, in Judaeo-Greek, is that the final vowel was indicated only with vowel diacritic dots beneath the final consonant, and in this text the vowel diacritic dots are not written.

2) The other possible explanation invokes the Ancient Greek phonological phenomenon known as "movable nu":

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In brief, in Ancient Greek there were a significant number of words where a letter nu, which was not inherently part of the word, could be added to the end of the word, for prosodic purposes. In all of the examples in the article, this movable nu follows a final iota or a final epsilon.

It is possible that the Voynich ms author made extremely liberal use of this movable nu, adding it to virtually every Greek word ending in iota or epsilon, and perhaps eta or upsilon as well, or perhaps any vowel. This would explain the very large number of Voynich words that end in one of the two characters [l] and [(i)in].

It is already clear from my readings and interpretations so far that, if my theory is correct, the author was quite familiar with many Ancient Greek forms. My interpretations so far produce a mixture of classical and medieval Greek forms, words, grammar, and syntax. Again, this is not necessarily atypical of Byzantine Greek, although I am not claiming that the particular style of mixture of forms that I find here is necessarily akin to any known extant style of Byzantine Greek.

One may fairly ask, how likely was it that an early 15th century Judaeo-Greek speaker, whose literary training and experience would have been more likely to be in Hebrew, would also be familiar with some of the finer points of Ancient Greek forms, grammar, style, and syntax?

Thus I should refine the hypothesis in this way: The Voynich ms author was *familiar* with Judaeo-Greek and the way that it was written in the Hebrew script. The author could have been a Judaeo-Greek speaker himself or herself, or the author could have simply been any Greek speaker who became familiar with Judaeo-Greek and its script. The ambiguity of Greek vowels and some Greek consonants in the Hebrew script of Judaeo-Greek could have been an inspiration or a motivation or a basis for this author to develop the Voynich script. The author may have been more knowledgeable about classical and medieval (modern to the author) Greek, and then simply used the Judaeo-Greek script as a basis from which to create the Voynich script.

Geoffrey

P.S.: It will get even more complicated if the author added the concept of a "movable sigma" to add an extraneous sigma (Voynich [y]) to the ends of some Greek words that don't inherently have the letter. In fact, in the phrase of Judaeo-Spanish that I interpreted from the other text that I posted here, I noticed the unusual endings of the last two words of the phrase "todos dias de-tus vidas". In standard Spanish, this last part "tus vidas" sounds very strange to me: It combines singular "you" and plural "lives"! In Judaeo-Spanish, one explanation is that final "s" had a tendency to be dropped in pronunciation, a very familiar phenomenon in Andalusian, Latin American, and above all Caribbean Spanish. If final "s" is essentially silent anyway, adding an extraneous final "s" in writing doesn't affect the pronunciation at all! In any case, this possible example of extraneous final "s" in Judaeo-Spanish may offer a possible explanation for a parallel phenomenon in the writing of Greek words in the Judaeo-Greek or Judaeo-Greek-inspired script of the Voynich ms.