geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[geoffreycaveney]

... it seems quite bizarre that he already has to defend his thesis ...

Sorry, but claiming that one can read and understand the text in the Voynich MS, after 100 year of unsuccessful attempts, is a Very Big Claim.

Theses are there to be defended.

Nothing bizarre about it being challenged. 

No argument so far, all of these statements are fair, and I cannot disagree with any of them.

Especially since it has absolutely *nothing* about it that makes it in any way more interesting than all the preceding ones.

Same-old same-old:
- Complicated translation tables
- Lots of hand-waving
- Barest amount of credible plain text
- No explanation for any of the very unusual statistics of the Voynich MS text

Here is where I disagree. Let me focus on the final statement here: 
"No explanation for any of the very unusual statistics of the Voynich MS text".

Now I understand this is a complex theory. How "complicated" you think the translation tables are, depends upon your knowledge of linguistics and your familiarity with basic categories such as "labial", "dental", "guttural", "liquid", "nasal", "sibilant" for consonants, and "front vowels", "rounded vowels", "low vowels" and "mid vowels" (as opposed to "high vowels"). If you are familiar with these categories and you agree that they are natural groupings of sounds in languages, then I don't think the translation tables are actually so complicated. Each set of characters represents one of these linguistic categories of sounds.

I understand that this is a very long thread by now, going on for almost a month with almost 200 posts now. So Rene and other readers may have missed some important points and details in certain posts. In an earlier post, which Rene among others clicked "Thanks" on, Marco raised a series of questions about my theory in relation to the statistics of the Voynich MS text. I gave two very detailed replies to Marco's post, which only Koen clicked "Thanks" on one of them. So perhaps you missed my detailed replies, and you would have thanked me for them if you had seen them and read them. For reference, Marco's post was #147 in this thread, and my two detailed replies were #148 and #149 in this thread.

Allow me to quote just one example of a point I made in my detailed reply to Marco in my post #148 in this thread. Once you have read and understood the point I am making here, I think you will have to agree that it is not accurate to say that my theory has "no explanation for any of the very unusual statistics of the Voynich MS text".

Quoting my post #148 in this thread:

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"As for the almost exclusive restriction of [q] to word-initial position, and the high frequency of [qok-] (by far the most frequent [q]-sequence) and [qot-] (by far the second most frequent one), I can also offer plausible explanations in line with my theory. It would be plausible that the author preferred to use the most prominent gallows character for the first consonant of the root of a word. So for example when the ubiquitous simple Greek conjunction "kai" ("and") is prefixed to a following word, the author chose to use [qo-], representing "ka'-", rather than [to-], so that the first consonant of the following root word would remain the most visually prominent character in the word, as the first and usually the only gallows character in the word. This way the little "ka'-" conjunction prefix would not "steal the thunder" of the much more important and significant first consonant of the main root word: the pride of place as the prominent first gallows character of the word was reserved for that first root consonant, and the smaller, simpler, less prominent [q] was used for the "k" in "ka'-" instead.

"However, when the first consonant of the root word was not a gallows character anyway, this aesthetic issue was not relevant, so there the author did not necessarily need to use [q] as a less prominent alternate character for [t] in the prefixed conjunction "ka'-" ("kai"). Thus, the primary purpose and usage of [q] throughout the MS text is mainly to represent the "k" in "ka'-" before "gallows-initial" root words, in order to avoid the use of the "competing" prominent gallows character [t] as "k" in such positions. This explains the frequency of the occurrence of [qo-Gallows] that Marco raises the question about."
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There you go: a clear and logical explanation for an unusual statistical anomaly of the Voynich MS text, based on my theory, specifically related to the Greek word "kai" and the first consonant of the following Greek word, and related to the aesthetic appearance of various alternate characters in each of the character sets in my theory.

This point was part of a broader point about the plausible effect of having sets of various alternate characters for groups of related sounds, and how the author's free choice of which alternate character to use where, could plausibly explain certain unusual statistical features of Voynich word structure and line structure. Now that you have seen a clear example of how it works to explain one particular unusual statistical anomaly of the Voynich MS text, perhaps you will be better prepared to appreciate the more general point. So again, I quote further from my post #148 in this thread:

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"Concerning other issues of word structure and the line as a functional unit, I believe that my table at least provides the basis for a possible plausible explanation for many of these issues. Not only can [d] be used as a substitute for [p] and [f], but also likewise [s] is essentially a substitute for [k], and [q] is a substitute for [t]. (Also, although I have not added it to the table yet, I suspect that [g] and [m] are essentially most often substitutes for [y].) The possibility of all of these substitutions of alternate characters, without affecting the underlying language of the text at all, may possibly explain the existence of some of the more unusual features of Voynich word structure and line structure. Basically, having all of these optional alternate characters at his or her disposal as substitutions wherever and whenever desired, the author would have been free to create many unusual character distribution patterns, and again it would not have affected or changed the underlying language of the text at all."
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And finally, I quote again one further detailed example of the explanatory powers of my theory in relation to a statistical phenomenon of the Voynich MS text, again from my post #148 in this thread:

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"Consider for example the virtual impossibility of double gallows (non-occurrence of any two characters of the set [k, t, p, f, ckh, cth, cph, cfh] next to each other, with only 6 isolated exceptions in the entire MS text), which Emma raised and discussed in a long-running thread on this forum. My theory and table offer a simple explanation: the author was easily able to avoid double gallows by always using an alternate character as a substitute for one of them instead. Now in Greek, many of these combinations will not often naturally occur anyway, but one such type of combination will occur indeed: "-pt-" and "-kt-", as in "hepta" and "okto". The author did not have to use double gallows for such combinations, because he or she could use [ps] and [ts] instead (usually in the form of [psh] and [tsh]). The combination [ks] (usually as [ksh]) for "-tt-" is also possible. Alternately, the author could write [dk] to represent "-pt-" or "-bd-" for example, which in fact I propose occurs in the word [chedkaly] that I identified as "hebdom[e]s" ("sevenths" or I suggested "sabbaths").

"On the other hand, in Greek such combinations with "k" rather than "t" as the second letter in the cluster will be much, much rarer. This is why we don't have words such as "hepcagon" or "otcagon" in our languages today. And here we find a possible explanation for the positional restriction of [q] in the Voynich MS text, which issue Marco raises in his post. Unlike [s]/[sh], the author didn't need to use the alternate character [q] in this cluster-final position, because unlike Greek "t", Greek "k" rarely occurs there."
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I hope that we can all now agree that it is not correct to claim that my theory offers "no explanation for any of the very unusual statistics of the Voynich MS text".

Geoffrey