geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Geoffrey: 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....

It was actually less about that (which is why I used the example of the letter "y" in English, which can be both consonant and vowel) than it was about the degrees of freedom increasing rather substantially when transliterating the VMS characters.

If

1. the vowels can be substituted to a significant extent AND
   
2. you have a character that can function as both a consonant and a vowel AND
   
3. you add vowels to the end as needed...
   

you end up with a system in which there is so much latitude, that it's difficult to assess whether the tokens are being translated or created to suit the language at hand (whether it were Judaeo-Greek or another language wouldn't matter). I can get a lot of words and phrases out of VMS tokens using only number 1.

I understand the concern. It is a valid concern with any ambiguous writing system. But your 3 points would also be valid to challenge the legitimacy of the Judaeo-Greek script itself! All 3 criteria apply to Judaeo-Greek written in the Hebrew script, as well as to many other such abjad scripts. And yet people have been able to read and write and understand such scripts for many millennia - as long as the readers are native speakers of the underlying language. Of course for those of us who are not native speakers of Judaeo-Greek, it is much more difficult than it would have been for the intended audience of the Voynich MS.

Here is a way to challenge and test the degrees of freedom and latitude in my system: Someone who knows Greek can use my letter correspondence system and attempt to create their own alternate interpretations of the lines I interpret as I have presented them here. If someone else can produce their own equally valid, equally grammatical Greek sentences, with equally plausible semantic content of any nature, using the same system, but with substantially different Greek readings and interpretations, then that would indeed be a legitimate challenge to the validity of the system that I propose. However, if such alternate readings and interpretations are less compelling, if the Greek is less grammatical, if the semantic content is less plausible, or if they have to stretch the latitude and the degrees of freedom to a far greater extent than my readings and interpretations do - then that would suggest that my system does not create too much ambiguity or too much latitude or too many degrees of freedom after all.

Geoffrey

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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).
  

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This is the second part of my reply to David.

I understand the point about the sacredness of the Hebrew script. I understand the corresponding point about the likelihood of using Greek variant words rather than Yevanic. Indeed, this is quite possibly true. So far, all I can say is that the systemic structure of the script seems to be based on Yevanic written in the Hebrew script (i.e., essentially an adapted abjad), and that I find a strikingly significant sentence containing Jewish cultural content, in Greek, in a particularly significant place in the MS, the very final paragraph. Beyond those two observations, I cannot yet say whether the underlying language of the text is more Greek or more Yevanic. I do observe that certain grammatical forms and phrases appear to be more ancient or classical Greek, such as the dative case, but written to reflect more medieval Greek pronunciation. 

Diacritics are mainly necessary for people who are not native speakers of the language. The diacritics were added to the Hebrew Bible in the standard Masoretic Text because by that time period (7th-10th c. CE), Hebrew was no longer a living spoken vernacular language, and thus diacritics that had not been necessary in earlier times had become necessary by then. Native Arabic speakers and readers do not need diacritics to read Arabic. In the parallel text Hebrew and Judaeo-Spanish book from which I posted a page earlier in this thread, it is striking that the Hebrew side has vowel diacritic dots but the Judaeo-Spanish side does not. It was written for native Judaeo-Spanish speakers who didn't need the diacritics for their native spoken language, but did need them for Hebrew.

There are a significant number of elements that appear to be signs of a deliberate intention to make the script hard to read for the uninitiated, even those who knew Greek and Yevanic. Ambiguating the consonants, then creating alternate characters for each type of those ambiguated consonants, strikes me as a clear sign of an intention to make the script effectively a cipher that only those who knew the encryption and decryption system would be able to figure out, even among those who knew Greek and Yevanic, which knowledge would of course also be necessary to read and understand the script. The reversal of the script direction could have been another step to disguise the Yevanic / Hebrew / Jewish nature and origin of the script and text.

I can think of logical reasons for the author to feel the need to create such a cipher.

The Voynich MS dates to the period of the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire. It is true that Constantinople itself did not fall until 1453, but many parts of the Byzantine Empire were conquered by the Ottomans well before that date, by the late 14th and early 15th centuries, including substantial areas of Greece itself. Perhaps the author of the Voynich MS felt the need to hide the contents of it during this period, and even to prevent outsiders from being able to identify the script or language or cultural origin of the MS at all. That would be a justification for many of the features and elements of the encryption system that I have described here, including the decision not to write in their sacred script, which could be identified as such even by others who didn't know or read the language. Of course there are many possible reasons for an author to want to conceal the contents of a text, not just from Ottoman conquerors in one particular time and place.

An alternative explanation for the different, non-sacred, script might be found in the Karaite Jewish community. Karaites are Jewish but they do not accept the Talmud as an authoritative interpretation of the Torah and the Tanakh, which distinguishes them from Rabbinic Judaism. There was a substantial community of Constantinopolitan Karaites in the Byzantine Empire in the medieval period; a small community still exists today. They also spoke Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek, but in the case of their community the language was called Karaeo-Greek or Karaitika. The Karaites were significant enough among medieval Greek Jews in particular, that some well-known leading Romaniote Greek Jewish scholars (Romaniotes were and are Rabbinic) wrote about the need to reunite the two Greek Jewish communities. The Constanopolitan Karaites were also known for producing leading scholars and writers.

I bring all this up, because although the Karaites also wrote Judaeo-Greek in the Hebrew script, they have been known historically to have less attachment to the sacredness of the Hebrew script in and of itself. For example, consider the information in the following paper:

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This paper notes for example that in the 10th and 11th centuries, Karaites in Palestine and Egypt even wrote manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible in Arabic transcription. A letter described in the paper shows that Karaite scribes made copies of Arabic language ms both in Judaeo-Arabic (that is, in the Hebrew script) and in the Arabic script. The paper cites a 10th century Karaite scholar who defended the writing of the Hebrew language in the Arabic script, making the argument that (quoting the paper) "written letters are merely the symbols of the language. The language would be the same whatever script it is written in." But he acknowledged disagreement on this matter among Jews and perhaps among Karaites themselves.

Of course none of this means that Karaites necessarily have a connection to the Voynich MS, but it does show that one significant and prominent medieval Judaeo-Greek community belonged to a tradition that perhaps had less religious attachment to the sacredness of the Hebrew script itself, even though they used it to read and write both Hebrew and Judaeo-Greek. Perhaps Karaites would have had fewer qualms about writing a text such as the Voynich MS in such a strange and different script. Again, it is just an idea, not an essential part of my theory.

Geoffrey