geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

1) When you turn English into abjad spelling (I'd really prefer to call it "dropping vowels" since abjads are something very specific), you notice that there are certain things you cannot do. For example, it's often very hard to drop initial vowels. The word "initial" would become "ntl", which is hard to revert properly. However, in his decipherment Geoffrey does take such liberties with adding vowels.

This is where the (glottal) stop comes in. In our languages, these are not written. However (depending on the language and even the dialect) we may very well pronounce them. "Initial" has one. This is the right place where a text written using the Hebrew alphabet would use the Aleph character.

If the source text of the Voynich MS *really* was written in an unpointed Hebrew version of Greek, then there are two possibilities:
1) the person converting it to Voynichese did understand which vowel should be where
2) this person did not understand.

Now the Voynichese text (according to this theory) has vowels, in the right places, but not the right ones.
This does not fit with either option.

It depends how you define "the right ones". As I have already pointed out previously, in Judaeo-Greek the Hebrew letters Aleph and Ayin have identical phonetic values:

   
   
   

Thus, if Voynich [a] represented Aleph, and Voynich [o] represented Ayin, the author could have used either of them, interchangeably, in any place where either of them could be written in Judaeo-Greek, in free variation, without having any effect on the pronunciation of the underlying text.

Geoffrey