geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[davidjackson]

OK, let's see if I can get this straight.

Your theory is that Voynichese is a transliteration of Judaeo-Greek, which I understand to be known more formally as Yevanic.
Yevanic is a dialect of Greek written using the Hebrew alphabet.

So far, so good. Yevanic is mutually intelligible with Greek; and the conquered Moors of Spain did the same thing with Arabic (the literary tradition of the aljamiadas). No doubt there are some differences, it isn't straight Greek, but I understand that essentially a Greek and a Yevanic can chat perfectly happily together.

Two questions thus occur to me. Maybe I'm just not understanding the system properly.

• Why the additional translation into the Greek alphabet? Essentially, the word is the same in Yevanic and Greek, just that two different scripts are used, unless we are looking at a dialect argot or Hebrew loan word. Are you saying that the user was a Greek writer who transliterated his text twice? Otherwise, we seem to have added an arbitrary layer of transliteration that isn't needed. Voynichese -> Yevanic -> Greek --> English can logically be distilled into Voynich -> Yevanic --> English.
  If the underlying text is Greek, then we don't need Yevanic. If it is Yevanic, we don't need the Greek.
  
  
• The whole point of Yevanic was because the script was sacred to the users. They used the sacred Hebrew characters to write down their (new) mother tongue, ie Greek. Transliterating Hebrew into Voynichese defeats the purpose of this. What's more, I would assume that an orthodox Yevanic (Jew) wouldn't do this - they would go from Greek and keep the sacred script intact. Of course, this is subjective and we can't prove this. It is a consideration however - it seems more likely that the Greek variant word would have been used rather than the Yevanic. It also seems strange that they would not include the diacritics, and would invert the script direction (left to right as per Latin, rather than right to left as per Hebrew / Yevanic).
  

.