geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory

[RenegadeHealer]

Geoffrey, thank you for a highly enjoyable read; I've spent pieces of the last 5 days savoring this thread up to this point. Pro sports fandom has never been my thing, but the vicarious thrills of seeing you present and defend your theory give me some idea of what this must feel like. Whether it pans out or not, for now I'm rooting for your theory, and am certain that even if it turns out to be wrong, it will serve as a valuable stepping stone to the correct theory.

I appreciate several things about Geoffrey Caveney's Judeo-Greek Theory (GCJGT) that I think we all could learn from:

• While the merits of taking a bottom-up, tree-view approach to a mystery needs no explanation to any serious scientist or historian, taking a forest-view, top-down approach nevertheless has its place.
  
• It takes a thick skin — and a readiness to learn lots, lots more about lots of different subjects — to propose and defend any grand overarching theory of anything. Geoffrey stands out among most Voynich.ninja users who have attempted the same.
  
• The proposed steps from human speech to Voynichese are plausible, and explained in a logically coherent way. (Note that I didn't say "likely", just "plausible".)
  
• The theory is testable, and I think a lot of contributors to this thread have already brainstormed some good ideas about ways to test it, which are very doable, and transferrable to similar theories.
  

I have some ideas about ways to go forward with this theory, and would be willing to help out with any of these, if they'd be of value:

1. A transliteration table that assigns each vord: A likely Yevanic word in Hebrew script, Greek script, and Romanized transliteration, and a confidence score for the latter. I'm picturing a system where a using a degree of freedom to get from one written symbol to another incurs a point, and the vords with the fewest points are assigned the highest confidence. I'm still trying to work out the list of point-incurring violations, but I'd want it to systematically account for all the instances where a guess or an unclear choice was made. Then focus translation / decryption efforts on the paragraphs of the VMS that seem to have the highest confidence scores.
   
2. Bolstering support for GCJGT by listing out all of the assumptions it rests on in a flowchart, and finding data to support each one in turn. For example, David Jackson correctly pointed out that GCJGT assumes that Yevanic writers used an inconsistent and ad-hoc mishmash of matres lectiones and vowel dots in the writing of spoken Judeo-Greek. Maybe. A further assumption that rests upon this one (and is no less crucial to the validity of the theory), is that often these "intended" vowel markers of either type were left out entirely by Yevanic writers. Maybe. If this were my doctoral thesis, I'd probably be tracking down pretty much every piece of written Yevanic known to exist, with highest priority given to specimens contemporaneous with the VMS's composition. If nothing I found remotely supported the assumptions that David Jackson pointed out, I'd seriously reconsider the theory.
   
3. Reconciling the final version of the crib for GCJGT with the well-documented differences in Currier A and Currier B, and speculating on what in the spoken and written Yevanic language might explain this discrepancy.
   

It's a shame that Yevanic is a moribund language, if not already extinct. There are so few people alive today with any connection to this language, that seeking out any of them and asking for their help would feel intrusive; I can't help but think of the stereotypical anthropologist in the South Pacific, who came with the best intentions and can't see why the locals resent being his specimens. I bring this up because family heirloom notebooks and letters would probably be the most valuable things someone of Romaniote heritage could share with this effort, and these are incredibly personal.

I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none, who has long had an interest in languages and linguistics, and might have gone into this field if I hadn't chosen medicine instead. I've long thought that I'd love to find someone who has worked seriously with many foreign languages, show them the VMS, and ask them to just filter it through all they've learned and see what jumps out at them. In a sense, this is exactly what Geoffrey did, in noticing [epairody] in the first line of f67r, and seeing "iperious" jump out at him. Proving this is the hard part of course. But it's struck me that it may take someone with a very broad and non-traditional fund of knowledge to stare at the VMS and see a viable pull-string.