geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

My original objections are just being confirmed at each post.

- The Voynich text is converted into a string of text that is not really meaningful.
- This conversion includes a large number of inconsistent changes.
- The not really meaningful text is then adapted to a string of words in some language (here: Greek, but really a mixture of classical and medieval Greek).
- This final text is not grammatical and needs to be further explained.

A correct interpretation immediately leads to a reasonable plain text.

It would also be possible to clearly describe how this plain text resulted into the Voynich MS text.

What we have here is a proposed solution that behaves exactly like all the failed solutions we have seen in the past, namely:
- a great amount of freedom in converting characters
- a plain text that does not really mean anything

At the same time we are told why this solution that does not look right is still right, namely:
- it is a mixture of various levels of Greek
- there is deliberate obfuscation by the original author

The identification of a word that points to hebrew culture is also not at all convincing.
This is a word (in Voynichese) of which it is pointed out that it only appears once in the entire MS.
This word in Voynichese also has several characters that can be mapped to many different plain text characters. I count the number of options below:


[ch][e][d][k][a][l][y]  : [5][4][6][3][5][2][2]

(Mistakes not excluded).

First of all, I want to thank Rene for his critical comments. If we want to read, interpret, and understand the text of the Voynich MS, we have to be methodical about the process. Criticism is an essential part of the methodical process. I appreciate it.

I also appreciate the specific detailed criticism of the interpretation of the word [chedkaly]. I understand that Rene's specific criticism of one word of course does not mean that he accepts the other words either, but nevertheless it can be productive to focus on one specific thing at a time. And this is a critical word, so it is a good word to begin with.

As Rene often emphasizes, it is important to think about the encryption process, which the author/scribe used, rather than just the decryption process, which we use to interpret the encrypted text. Here is the encryption process that I propose was employed for this word:

plausible late medieval Greek word form: εβδομες

plausible Judaeo-Greek word form: היבדאמש

Voynich MS word form: [chedkaly]

Every letter in every step of this process looks completely logical and plausible to me. 

Furthermore, in terms of the ambiguity in the possible interpretation of Voynich characters as plain text characters, there are two separate layers of this: primarily the consonants in interpreting the Voynich form as Judaeo-Greek, and primarily the vowels in interpreting the Judaeo-Greek form as Greek.

1) The ambiguity of the vowels in interpreting Judaeo-Greek, without the vowel diacritic dots, as Greek, is simply an established historical linguistic fact. I did not invent this ambiguous system myself out of whole cloth; it arose historically from the lack of vowel letters in the Hebrew script.

Thus we find the first Greek epsilon in the word written as Hebrew he+yod, and the second Greek epsilon in the word not written in Hebrew letters at all. The second epsilon would have been indicated only by Hebrew vowel diacritic dots, which are not written in the Voynich MS. The initial Hebrew he is perfectly logical, as the representation of the Greek initial "rough breathing" in the historical etymology of the Greek word. As for the Hebrew yod, it is possible that this glide is written because the vowel precedes a voiced fricative consonant, whereas it is not written for the second Greek epsilon because this vowel precedes a voiceless consonant.

2) Now let us consider the ambiguity of the consonants in interpreting the Voynich form as Judaeo-Greek. First of all we can easily deal with cases such as the "ambiguity" of Voynich [y] as Judaeo-Greek shin / Greek sigma or Judaeo-Greek zayin / Greek zeta. Could you please provide me with a list of native Greek words that end in final zeta? I think it will be a short list. The consonant value of this Voynich character is not ambiguous at all here. Not at all.

Voynich [d] is a critical letter. I understand JKP's concern about the status of this character as either a vowel or a consonant, but in fact this also arises naturally from Greek and Hebrew phonology. The Hebrew letter vav can likewise be either a glide /w/ that functions to signify the place of a vowel, or a consonant pronounced /v/. Moreover, the Hebrew letter bet is very often pronounced /v/ as well. This coincidence of the pronunciation of the Hebrew letters vav and bet provides a natural explanation for the use of Voynich [d] to represent either Hebrew letter. In native Hebrew words, the historical etymology clearly distinguishes and determines where to write vav vs. where to write bet. But in using the script to write Judaeo-Greek words, no such etymological basis for the distinction would have existed. In fact, the most natural counterpart for vav in the Greek script would have been digamma, but that Greek letter famously disappeared from the standard language even before the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down. If one considers Voynich [d] as the equivalent of Hebrew vav/bet and thus of Greek digamma/beta, its status as either a vowel/glide or a consonant makes much more consistent and logical sense within the entire phonological system as presented in the Greek : Judaeo-Greek : Voynich letter correspondence table.

The point is, even if the [d] in Voynich [chedkaly] were interpreted as the Judaeo-Greek vowel/glide letter vav rather than the consonant letter bet, it would still be pronounced the same way, and it could still derive from Greek beta in either case - since we know it didn't derive from Greek digamma!

Thus, the remaining ambiguity of the consonants in interpreting Voynich [chedkaly] as Judaeo-Greek is really all about whether Voynich [d] and [k] represent voiced or voiceless stops or fricatives. But first of all, Judaeo-Greek using the Hebrew script doesn't even distinguish the voiceless stop /p/ from the voiceless fricative /f/ ("ph"), nor the voiceless stop /t/ from the voiceless fricative /th/. And neither the Hebrew script nor the Greek script distinguishes the voiced stop /b/ from the voiced fricative /v/, nor the voiced stop /d/ from the voiced fricative /dh/ ("th" in English "the"). Thus, the only real ambiguity in interpreting these consonants Voynich [d] and [k] lies in whether they represent voiced or voiceless consonants.

I interpret them here as voiced consonants, thus representing Judaeo-Greek -בד- and by extension Greek -βδ-. But what if one wanted to argue that one could equally well interpret them as voiceless consonants, as Judaeo-Greek -פת- and by extension Greek -πτ-?

Well, in this case the root of the word would change from Greek εβδομος "seventh" to ... Greek επτα "seven"! All of the supposed ambiguity of the consonants in my proposed encryption/decryption system, as applied to this word, amounts to the simple alternation between the Greek stems for "seven" and "seventh".

=======

As for the supposed ambiguity of Voynich [l] in [chedkaly] as either "m" or "n", you can look up every single Greek word beginning with εβδ- or επτ- in Liddell & Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon and not find a single form where the next consonant is nu. Once one has identified the root of this word, the consonants of the rest of the word are completely clear and unambiguous.

The Voynich word stem [chedk-] determines three things in my system:
1. It begins with a front vowel or diphthong, possibly preceded by rough breathing ("h").
2. It then has a labial obstruent consonant (since the glide vav is pronounced the same as bet / beta in this context).
3. It then has a dental/alveolar obstruent consonant. (The cluster [-dk-] is not common in the Voynich MS text, so I interpret its occurrence here as a specific representation of a consonant cluster without an unwritten vowel in between them.)

In Greek, such a root in the semantic and grammatical context of the rest of the sentence is overwhelmingly likely to be επτα / εβδο- "seven / seventh". One finds not a single entry in A Greek-English Lexicon beginning with ηπτ- or ηβδ-. There is the root υπτι- "lay oneself back, fall back", etc., but neither the semantics of the sentence nor the grammar of the sentence nor the word ending of [chedkaly] provides any truly plausible form of this root as a candidate to be this word. With ιπτ- one finds a modern Greek form such as ιπταμενος "flying ; aircrew, flyer". This is perfect for anyone with a theory about UFOs, flying saucers, and the Voynich MS; not so much for the rest of us.

Moreover, the ambiguities between the various roots επτα / εβδο-, υπτι-, ιπτα-, etc., may exist in written Judaeo-Greek in the Hebrew script, just as much as they exist here in the Voynich MS script! In such writing systems, readers simply have to use general context and their familiarity and experience with the language in order to figure out the meaning of each word. Experienced readers of Arabic, for example, can even read Arabic texts without the dots marked, and in Arabic the dots distinguish between different consonants, not just the vowels! The point is, a Judaeo-Greek reader of the Voynich MS who knew the encryption and correspondence system that I propose was employed, who knew the language well, and who knew the cultural context of the text, could have figured out that [chedkaly] means "היבדאמש" means "εβδομες", despite the certain amount of phonetic ambiguity in both the Voynich and the Judaeo-Greek forms of the word.

=======

It is going to take a long time to go through all 38,000 individual words in the Voynich MS one by one in this way, in order to convince some people that the MS is written in Judaeo-Greek, but I believe that the effort will be worth it.

-------
Geoffrey Caveney