geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

(In case anyone is curious: at this rate, working 8-10 hours every day, 5 days a week, I estimate that it would take me about 20 years of concentrated effort to read and interpret the entire Voynich MS text using my method at the pace that I am able to do so currently.

If you're working on the "right" solution, it will speed up a lot. Because there must be a system and you will discover it.

If you're working on the "wrong" solution, you will stall. You need to keep adding more and more freedom.
In a recent mail I just saw yet another, new, possible meaning of the Voynich character d , where it could represent Greek 'ai'.

I believe you mean to say Greek "ia" here, and I believe you are referring to the Greek word "diaktos", meaning "carried through pipes". This is a rare word, and its meaning is closely related to the Latin root of "ductus", and I believe the author was writing "duct'-" in this part of this word, which comes out as Voynich [sdqs-].

There will always be irregular individual cases like this in any MS text. In some MS texts it could be much worse. Imagine if someone were trying to decipher an English text and had to explain the spelling and phonology of a word such as "women"! When the person reading and interpreting the text first tried to explain how the standard form of the word is written with the letter "o" but pronounced as /i/, it would be difficult to explain and to understand, would it not? The irregularities in my readings and interpretations are quite minor by comparison.

Until now, you have a minimal amount of plain text, and the relation of this plain text with the Voynich text is extremely thin.

For an example of a 'translation' with fewer degrees of freedom than yours, with a longer plain text, that seems to be somewhat on topic, see the paper "The cannabis page of the Voynich Manuscript".
Link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

For me, both are equally wrong, but if you think that you are right and he is wrong, you have to be able to point to a clear reason why his is wrong and you are not.

I am glad Rene brought up this example, because it just so happens that I have researched the work of this researcher, J. Michael Herrmann, who claims that the Voynich MS text is written in Book Pahlavi. Now first of all, Book Pahlavi is a fascinatingly ambiguous script, and it is well worth studying its details for anyone who wishes to comprehend how an extremely ambiguous script could possibly work in practice. Studying it, you will find it hard to believe that anyone could ever read it, but yet it was the main script for Zoroastrian texts in Middle Persian for over a millennium! My system for Judaeo-Greek in Voynich characters is a model of logical clarity by comparison with Book Pahlavi, which is both ambiguous and a total mess in terms of groups of sounds represented by single letters, multiple letters, ligatures, etc., etc.

However, Herrmann's proposed theory of the Voynich MS as Book Pahlavi has all kinds of fundamental problems with it. I wrote up a summary of some of the problems in my notes a while ago, based on another paper of his, "The Voynich Manuscript is Written in Natural Language: The Pahlavi Hypothesis".
Link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Here are my notes on the fundamental problems with Herrmann's hypothesis and paper:

The Voynich-Pahlavi character table is fundamentally flawed in many ways, as I can tell very quickly based on all of my experience studying this ms. His main character for Pahlavi "k" is Voynich [f] and for Pahlavi "p" is Voynich [p]. I do not see any explanation for how this can be reconciled with the restriction of these characters to first lines of paragraphs. His main character for Pahlavi "t" is Voynich [l], which is strange since "t" should be frequent in initial position while [l] is much more frequent in final position. His main character for Pahlavi "n" is Voynich [d], which is strange for the opposite reason. Neither makes sense. To compensate for these and other problems, he includes two different variants of Pahlavi scripts to make the letters even more ambiguous than Book Pahlavi is. So Voynich [t], which is Pahlavi "m", can also be a Pahlavi "t", and Voynich [ch], which is Pahlavi "š", can also be a Pahlavi "t" as well, among other things. Even Book Pahlavi isn't that bad by itself.

Yes, there are ambiguous values in my table, but they are phonologically logical and consistent categories such as labial, dental, guttural, liquid, nasal, sibilant. Even for my most complicated character, Voynich [d], there is a logical connection from /u/ to /v/ to /b/. There is nothing in my table remotely close to Herrmann's illogical groups of letters, such as Voynich [t] representing Pahlavi "m" and "t".

And then when he lists all the Zodiac signs and the Voynich and Pahlavi words, the correspondences don't even match with his own problematic character table. He includes photos of the Voynich words, but he doesn't list his own Voynich transcriptions for them that he gives in his character table. Probably that's because they don't match up to the Pahlavi words based on his table. His Voynich [t] as Pahlavi "m"/"t" character also gets matched with a Pahlavi "k" in the Zodiac chart, but even he didn't include that option in his character table.

Finally, here is his effort to translate part of the 3rd paragraph of the 1st page of the ms. I present only the final English translation of all the words put together, exactly as he presents it in his paper:

"nature flower/fragrant herb pass by sprout blood family Spenta Armaiti capable sensitive guide separation/distribute me+worthy name/cause two/evil being beginning sprout (?) Spenta Armaiti (?)"

Please do not try to tell me that any of this in any way even remotely resembles my own theory and my own readings and interpretations of the text.

Geoffrey