geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

How would the article 'o' be represented in unpointed Judaeo-Greek?

One is setting up a false dichotomy when one only refers to "Judaeo-Greek with nikkud" vs. "unpointed Judaeo-Greek". I do not claim that the version of Judaeo-Greek represented in the Voynich MS text is in exact correspondence with either of these two systems. Rather, it represents a sort of compromise or hybrid between the two systems, in which the author makes an effort to represent some of the vowels, more than pure unpointed Judaeo-Greek would, but without the precision that would be possible in an alphabet with vowels, or in a system with all nikkud dots written.

To summarize the system again:

1) [ch] or [e] can represent any front vowel

2) [a] or [o] can represent any low or mid vowel (non-high vowel)

3) [d] can represent any rounded vowel

Category (1) is akin to Hebrew yod, category (3) is akin to Hebrew vav, and category (2) is akin to "any vowel other than /i/ or /u/" (which are the canonical, but not the only, vowel values of yod and vav).

By these very simple and logical rules, the article "o" is a mid vowel, so it can be represented by Voynich [o]. This is indeed how I find that it is in fact typically represented in the Voynich MS text according to my method, prefixed to the following noun that it modifies.

Geoffrey