geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Zhe: all things individually might be possible, but I have some reservations.

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.
2) In isolation every aspect of Geoffrey's method works to some extent. But what if you combine them, especially consonant flexibility and vowel dropping? 

I'm not completely certain yet, but for now my impression is that it would be a one-way cipher. Flexibility is so great that the initial meaning is not recoverable.

Hi, Koen.

First, I have to say that I am sorry because I had to leave in a hurry yesterday.

I also have concern about initial-vowel-dropping, but I think it could be split into two smaller questions.

1.1 Dropping initial vowels from short, common words.

I think it is mostly fine to drop initial vowels from shortest and most common pronouns and prepositions. For example, I think it could be probably fine if we write “am” as “m”, “and” as “nd” and “if” as “f”. However, this must be strictly limited to a few words, or we might not be able to tell “are” from “or”, or tell “is” from “as”. A possible solution is to write “are” as “r” but “or” still as “or”, and “is” as “s” but “as” still as “as”.

In the example above, Geoffrey added “e” before “meis” to form “emeis”. This is where I feel unsafe. From his explanation, I understand that “emeis” is 1st person pronoun, which, I guess, might be common enough. However, I think it is not a short one, and it might be possible to interpret “meis” into other words.

For now, Geoffrey did not add initial vowels to too many words, or maybe I am missing some other examples in other posts. As far as I know, I think it is still too early to say the arbitrary is too much.

1.2 Dropping initial vowels from long words.

That is almost impossible, for languages where initial vowels count a lot for meaning.

René gave a simple solution: to add a mark for there-is-a-vowel-here, so that initial becomes 'ntl. Yes, it is still hard to tell it from similar words like intel, but it is caused by English using ti digraph to render sh-sound. There would be no ambiguity if we have separate letters reading '-N-SH-L.

2 Combining Consonant Flexibility and Vowel Dropping.

You have a good point here. Small approximations might accumulate into large errors.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. blurred the boundary between voiced and voiceless consonants, so that any reader could have very high fliexibility. At the same time, it has also dropped diphthongs that it could not express into monophthongs, and consonant clusters into single consonants. In sum, it combines consonant flexibility and some kind of vowel dropping, but still be able to record real Greek. I think it would be fine to have some extent of flexibility.

However, as the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I would like to see the losing rule, or defecting rule, is simple and relatively fixed. That’s why I have placed a question mark about his adding of suffixes. I saw Geoffrey have had an answer, but I don’t have time to read it for now.

Now I have to go. I’ll come back and post my other concerns when I have time.

Chen Zhe: Thank you again for the detailed comments and observations. I appreciate the clarity of your comments very much.

I can summarize my reply about the deletion rule, or my adding of suffixes, in a very concise way: In very many cases, such deletion of suffixes can be explained completely naturally in Greek as elision of a final vowel before a following initial vowel. I cannot claim that this rule will explain all of the cases, but it will explain a significant number of the cases, and it does explain two of the cases in the line you cited, and it may explain the third case as well if the late medieval Greek dialect had already dropped the "-n" in the "-omen" suffix, which "-n" has indeed been dropped entirely in modern Greek.

So we may begin with this as our first deletion rule, and then we can examine the more limited set of other cases to identify other possible deletion rules.

Geoffrey