geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[ChenZheChina]

(continued)

2. You have proposed that the Voynich letters might be a further deduction of Hebrew letters, You have given an example where Judæo-Greek drops the original spelling of Greek words, but instead uses Hebrew letters to record the real pronunciation of by-then users.

This is also fine for me. I saw a lot of artificial phonetic letters designed to write English on Omniglot. By focusing on the real pronunciation, it is expected to see newly-developed letters being quite different than the original. This also happened to Chinese.

In Mandarin Chinese, there is a phoneme /ə/ which is actually pronounced [œ] [e] [ə] [ɤ] [o] [∅] dependently. For example, the syllable /x/ + /u/ + /ə/ + /ŋ/ actually   results in [xʊŋ]. In Wade-Giles (1892) and Bopomofo (1912), this syllable is written as hung and ㄏㄨㄥ (/x/ + /u/ + /əŋ/) respectively, both of which use /u/ for the vowel. However, in Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928) and Hanyu Pinyin (1958), this is written as hong in both systems, using /o/ for the vowel.

There is another example of this phoneme. The syllable /f/ + /ə/ + /ŋ/ results in [fɤŋ] in Mainland China, and thus romanized as feng in almost all romanization systems including Wade-Giles (1892), Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928) and Hanyu Pinyin (1958). In Bopomofo (1912), the syllable is also written as ㄈㄥ (/f/ + /əŋ/) without a doubt. However, in Tongyong Pinyin (1998), which is developed in Taiwan, fong is used instead of feng as the romanization of the syllable, to reflect its actual pronunciation in modern Taiwan.

The last example of the phoneme is one of the most simple syllables. The syllable /k/ + /ə/ results in [kɤ] in Mandarin Chinese. In Bopomofo (1912), it is written as ㄍㄜ (/k/ + /ə/). In Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928) and Hanyu Pinyin (1958), it is also written as ge. However, in Wade-Giles (1892) it is written as ko. The difference between o and e might reflect the actual pronunciation of each era, but I have no way to prove or disprove them.

* What I am sure is, by the time of Bopomofo (1912) and Hanyu Pinyin (1958), there have already been clear difference between actual pronunciations of phoneme /ə/ when combining with different consonants. Both Bopomofo and Hanyu Pinyin use different letters for the same phoneme /ə/: ㄛ and o are used with labial consonants like bo [po], po [pʰo], mo [mo], fo [fo], while ㄜ and e are used with alveolar and velar stops like de [tɤ], ge [kɤ], ke [kʰɤ], he [xɤ].

Then why we know that all these o’s and e’s are of the same phoneme? First, old phonology books, analyzing old pronunciations, say so. Second, in Modern Standard Mandarin, there is  no minimal pair between the pronunciations, except interjections. That is, we won’t get other words if we pronounce [po] as [pɤ] or pronounce [kɤ] as [ko]. Minimal pairs exist only for interjections. Single [o] for affirmative, single [e] for doubtful, and single [ə] or [ɤ] for negative and hesitation. However, it is possible that “[e] for doubtful” comes from Japanese えっ and “[ə] for hesitation” comes from English um, er.

My example here is merely to show that, when people adopt a new script, how much freedom they could have when choosing letters to express phones, and ignoring traditional phoneme systems and spellings. Considering this, I think the freedom Geoffrey has in their system is still in a reasonable scope.

(This is long, so I’ll write in separate posts)