Ruby's Greek Thread

[MarcoP]

One cause for concern might be that definite articles don't seem to match their nouns in gender, number, and case, as they typically would in Greek

You underline here the known difficulties, if they did not exist the text would have been deciphered long ago.

Exactly! One cannot expect much new information here, since this old basic method has been debunked so many times during the last century. Simple substitutions failed over and over again with several European languages, Greek included, and we know why. As you say, if this simple method worked, the text would have been deciphered long ago.

Simple substitutions of European languages are therefore excluded. Research can follow three other directions:

• A complex cipher. In this case the underlying language might be any artificial or natural language. In particular, we cannot exclude that the underlying language is Greek.
  
• The text is meaningless gibberish (there is no underlying language).
  
• A simple substitution / phonetic rendering of an artificial language or possibly an exotic language (e.g. a monosyllabic language, as proposed by Stolfi).
  

The first two possibilities are currently the most popular and were discussed in several of the talks at the recent Malta Conference. But useful research can also be (and is being) done by adding to our knowledge of Voynichese, without making assumptions about which of the three options is correct; this line was also amply represented at the conference of course.