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geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
- geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
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RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
geoffreycaveney > 11-04-2019, 08:28 PM
(11-04-2019, 07:41 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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 -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
geoffreycaveney > 11-04-2019, 09:20 PM
(10-04-2019, 11:47 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:... 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.
(10-04-2019, 11:47 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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 -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
ReneZ > 12-04-2019, 10:54 AM
What I meant with the statement that the tables are complicated is that for every Voynich word you quickly end up with hundreds of possible Greek plain text letter sequences out of which you have to select a suitable word.
Voynich-d is not just always one consonant category. It can also be a set of vowels.
For me, the tentative explanation of a few features is insufficient as an explanation why Voynichese has a word structure and why it has this low entropy.
This is why this method will never result in a meaningful plain text, and will require more and more degrees of freedom in the 'translation process', as I already wrote early on in this thread.
By now, also the plain text language, which used to be quite clearly defined as unpointed Judaeo-Greek, has become a not very well defined variety of it, or a combination of different systems, with some additional vowel symbols. -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
geoffreycaveney > 12-04-2019, 03:09 PM
As an exercise and a demonstration of the capacity of my system to interpret Voynichese text as real Greek text, and to express real Greek text as Voynichese text,
I present here a line of a well-known Greek text, rendered as Voynichese text according to my system:
[ shol ar shol chaiin ol shol opchedy chol soy chaiin chaiin ychaiin chorol ]
I hope we can all agree that this does indeed look like actual Voynichese.
Note 1: In this line all three [sh] characters happen to be [sh] with an open loop on top.
Note 2: This line of 13 Voynichese words represents 8 Greek words in the original text.
I have explained before that in my system, many Greek suffixes and some other syllables can be written as separate words in Voynichese.
In some cases, it may be simply the occurrence of a typical "Voynichese word-final" letter that forces a Voynichese word break in the middle of a single Greek word.
Note 3: Please recall that in my system, [ch] can represent either a front vowel or the "rough breathing" /h/ sound that is not written with a letter in the Greek script.
The latter use of [ch] explains why it is so frequent in word-initial position in Voynichese.
It can also appear as "word-initial" in Voynichese when it is a front vowel that begins a Greek suffix which is written as a separate word in Voynichese.
I believe that a reader who knows Greek, and who knows the letter correspondence table of my system, will be able to figure out what this line of a well-known Greek text says.
Geoffrey -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
Koffee > 12-04-2019, 07:18 PM
Hello, I had heard of this site in the past but only actually visited it a few days ago. I actually wanted to comment in another thread first, but I guess this is as good a time as any.
I'd like to make a few observations when I have more time, but for now, here is what I make of the exercise Goeffrey proposed.
Sh - τ
o - ο
l - ν
a - ά
r - ρ
sh - τ
o - ο
n - ν
ch - ῾
a - η
iin - μ
o - ώ
l - ν
sh - τ
o - ο
l - ν
o - ε
p - π
ch - ι
e - ο
d - ύ
y - σ
ch - ι
o - ο
l - ν
s - δ
o - ό
y - ς
ch - ᾿
a - η
iin - μ
ch - (blank initial, as per your Note 3)
a - ί
iin - ν
y - σ
ch - ή
a - (dunno about this one, I assume it attaches to the -iin below)
iin - μ
ch - (blank initial)
o - ε
r - ρ
o - ο
l - ν
It's an excerpt from the Lord's Prayer, I assume this is what you encoded? I was fairly certain of the beginning (τὸν άρτον), and after figuring out the end, I kinda put the pieces together. I checked to see if all of it fits with your schematic, and the only part I am not so sure about is the /a/ in the second-to-last word.
The issue of ambiguous mappings has already been raised of course, but if I can add to that, if I had gone word-for-word in a linear way, simply with trial and error, (which I did for a while) it would have taken way too much time, at least without some sort of clue/key, (which I did have for this text, as it is indeed a "well-known text", but for the actual VM...? it would get very complicated without a key for mappings or sth)
Anyway, this is a nice forum with a lot of interesting discussions, I'm looking forward to reading even more, on this site and the various blogs, since I have a lot of catching up to do
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RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
Koen G > 12-04-2019, 07:20 PM
Welcome to the forum, Koffee. Hope you stick around, we could do with a native Greek speaker
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RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
geoffreycaveney > 12-04-2019, 09:04 PM
(12-04-2019, 07:18 PM)Koffee Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello, I had heard of this site in the past but only actually visited it a few days ago. I actually wanted to comment in another thread first, but I guess this is as good a time as any.
I'd like to make a few observations when I have more time, but for now, here is what I make of the exercise Goeffrey proposed.
Sh - τ
o - ο
l - ν
a - ά
r - ρ
sh - τ
o - ο
n - ν
ch - ῾
a - η
iin - μ
o - ώ
l - ν
sh - τ
o - ο
l - ν
o - ε
p - π
ch - ι
e - ο
d - ύ
y - σ
ch - ι
o - ο
l - ν
s - δ
o - ό
y - ς
ch - ᾿
a - η
iin - μ
ch - (blank initial, as per your Note 3)
a - ί
iin - ν
y - σ
ch - ή
a - (dunno about this one, I assume it attaches to the -iin below)
iin - μ
ch - (blank initial)
o - ε
r - ρ
o - ο
l - ν
It's an excerpt from the Lord's Prayer, I assume this is what you encoded? I was fairly certain of the beginning (τὸν άρτον), and after figuring out the end, I kinda put the pieces together. I checked to see if all of it fits with your schematic, and the only part I am not so sure about is the /a/ in the second-to-last word.
The issue of ambiguous mappings has already been raised of course, but if I can add to that, if I had gone word-for-word in a linear way, simply with trial and error, (which I did for a while) it would have taken way too much time, at least without some sort of clue/key, (which I did have for this text, as it is indeed a "well-known text", but for the actual VM...? it would get very complicated without a key for mappings or sth)
Anyway, this is a nice forum with a lot of interesting discussions, I'm looking forward to reading even more, on this site and the various blogs, since I have a lot of catching up to do
Well done Koffee, you are exactly right of course.
Allow me to second Koen's welcome, we definitely need more and better Greek speakers and readers on the forum!
See, I told you all that it is possible to read Voynichese as Greek with my system. Naturally it is easier to figure out with a well-known text.
The striking thing for me is how naturally "Voynichese" the encoding appears, beginning from pure Greek and following my system. I consider this a good sign:
[ shol ar shol chaiin ol shol opchedy chol soy chaiin chaiin ychaiin chorol ]
" τον αρτον ημων τον επιουσιον δος ημιν σημερον. "
Literal word-for-word translation:
" The bread of us the daily give us today. "
Much more familiar to us as:
" Give us this day our daily bread. "
Koffee, in terms of linear word-for-word trial and error, I recommend that as a first step, you simply transliterate the Voynichese into what I call the "10-letter Greek alphabet"
[ch], [e] > iota
[a] > alpha
[o] > omicron
[d] > upsilon
[p], [f] > pi
[k], [s], [sh] with open loop > tau
[t], [q] > kappa
[y], [m], [g] > sigma
[l], [(i)in], [sh] with closed loop > nu
[r] > rho
I have found letter frequency statistics for the Greek New Testament, for example, and in fact these 10 letters constitute 70 percent of the entire text. Most of the rest is epsilon (10 percent), eta (4 percent), and omega (3 percent). This means that only a mere 13 percent of the entire Greek text consists of the remaining 11 consonant letters:
beta, gamma, delta, zeta, theta, lambda, mu, xi, phi, chi, psi
So if you start with the initial assumption that the whole text is part of the "10-letter Greek alphabet", you will already be likely to have a large majority of the text correct just with this first step. Then you can work through the text and see which letters need to be changed to make the text read as intelligible Greek, which I am certain that you can do better than I can, for example.
Here is how the process would work for this line of text, for example:
[ shol ar shol chaiin ol shol opchedy chol soy chaiin chaiin ychaiin chorol ]
" ton ar ton ian on ton opiius ion tos ian ian sian ioron "
or in Greek letters:
" τον αρ τον ιαν ον τον οπιιυς ιον τος ιαν ιαν σιαν ιορον "
Since the word breaks of Voynichese and Greek are not the same,
Greek paleographers might be more used to dealing with text such as the following:
" [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]τοναρτονιανοντονοπιιυσιοντοσιανιανσιανιορον "[/font]
You can see that in fact, just with this simple and automatic process as a first step, you already have the first two Greek words (three Voynich words) "τον αρτον" exactly correct. This is not an accident: it happens because we chose the most frequent Greek letters for our 10-letter Greek alphabet.
The next critical key step is to recognize where the iota's should really just be "rough breathing" /h/ sounds before word-initial Greek vowels:
"τον αρτον `αν ον τον οπιιυς ιον τος `αν ιαν σιαν ιορον"
Next, one is of course aware that mu and lamdba are by far the most frequent consonants missing from our 10-letter Greek alphabet, so the next step is to check for those letters. It is helpful here, as it often will be, to recognize the presence of two forms of the same root word in this line, which aids in figuring out where two of the nu's need to be changed to mu's:
"τον αρτον `α[font=Arial]μον τον οπιιυς ιον τος `αμιαν σιαν ιορον[/font]"
At this stage, I don't think it will be too difficult for a Greek speaker and reader (Koffee, please comment!) to recognize the tau that needs to be changed to a delta, and the one additional nu that needs to be changed to a mu:
"τον αρτον `α[font=Arial]μον τον οπιιυς ιον δος `αμιαν σιαμιορον[/font]"
Finally, once one has figured out all the consonants in this way, I don't think the various vowel changes that need to be made, will present too many difficulties for a Greek speaker and reader (Koffee, please comment!). I note in particular that many of the eta's were represented as "iota+alpha" in the initial 10-letter Greek transliteration step. It is too soon to tell if it will be possible to make this into a general rule, or if it just a tendency, or if it just a coincidence in this line, but it is the kind of pattern that I am looking for as I try to improve the capacity of the system to decrypt Voynichese into Greek more smoothly and efficiently with increasingly precise rules. I have always recognized that this is a work in progress.
"τον αρτον `[font=Arial]η[/font][font=Arial]μ[font=Arial]ω[/font]ν τον οπιουσιον δος `ημιαν σημιορον[/font]"
Koffee, regarding your question about the character [a] in the second-to-last Voynich word, it appears that in this line it is best to consider the sequence [cha] as Greek eta. As I wrote in the previous paragraph, I will have to investigate whether this can be identified as a more general tendency or even a rule in Voynichese.
If indeed [cha] is eta, then this would also explain [cha] = iota in the third-to-last Voynich word, since eta and iota were certainly pronounced identically by the late medieval period of the Voynich MS (in fact, since a long time before that), as they are in modern Greek today. The final step is to recognize where an "ο" and an "ιο" need to be changed to epsilon's, and with that we have our complete Greek text:
"τον αρτον `[font=Arial]η[/font][font=Arial]μ[font=Arial]ω[/font]ν τον επιουσιον δος `ημιν σημ[font=Arial]ε[/font]ρον[/font]"
Important observation on method: Although the vowels present the greatest difficulties for the technical precision of formulating the cryptological rules of my system, they do not present such a great difficulty in the practical reading and interpretation of a Voynichese text as the consonants do. The critical step in the process above certainly appears to be identifying which consonants need to be changed from the initial 10-letter Greek alphabet to other letters. Once all the consonants are correctly identified and in place, I don't think the remaining vowel change identifications present the same level of difficulty to the reader.
Koffee, what do you think of all these steps in the process? Do you agree with me about the consonants and the vowels? Your feedback as a native Greek speaker and reader is critical and precious to me for the deeper and more precise research of my method and my system that I have presented here.
Geoffrey -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
geoffreycaveney > 13-04-2019, 02:32 AM
Another exercise, probably mainly for Koffee, but of course anyone is welcome to try:
This will be Modern Greek, and not from a well-known text. But, like so much of the Voynich MS, it will be accompanied by an illustration:
And the Voynichese text is simply the caption for this illustration. Perhaps this is somewhat akin to the Voynich MS labels that accompany so many illustrations in the MS itself.
[ s rchol kar dos ckhaiin ychain dshey shol tarol shod shy char qod ]
Now please everyone, keep in mind that this is pure Modern Greek, so we cannot expect this Voynichese text to look exactly like the Voynich MS itself, which was after all a late medieval mixture of classical and medieval Greek, as was typical of much written Greek in that period. Nevertheless, I submit that this line of text is still a fair resemblance and approximation of typical Voynich MS Voynichese text. Thus, "[qod]" may not be a common Voynich MS word or a typical use of the character "[q]", but nevertheless this Voynichese word occurs 8 times in the Voynich MS, for example.
Note 1: In this line again, all four [sh] characters happen to be [sh] with an open loop on top.
Note 2: Consider this a line where [p] and [f] were not written at all (as in most of the Voynich MS).
Note 3: It is necessary to note here that many Greek word-final vowels are simply deleted. And yet, I am confident that this will not prevent Koffee from figuring out what the caption says.
Note 4: This line of 13 Voynichese words represents 9 Greek words in the original text.
Note 5: In one place in this text, one Voynich vowel character is a pure "placeholder", with no phonetic Greek value, between two consonants. This is actually akin to the representation of Greek in the Linear B script, but I have not previously proposed such a phenomenon in my theory until now. One may alternately interpret this statement as "Geoffrey alters his theory with another line of text yet again", or as "Geoffrey refines and improves his theory yet again, based on additional data".
Geoffrey -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
Markus > 13-04-2019, 09:00 AM
Nil return - I looked at this for a couple of hours and got no further than thinking the ημων might be [font=Arial]ημων or [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial]η[/font][font=Arial]μ[/font]ιν. I am not a Greek speaker - I know ancient Greek to the level of having edited an ancient Greek text as a PhD thesis. I think this says more about my pattern recognition skills than about the validity of the coding method.[/font][/font] -
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory
Koen G > 13-04-2019, 10:03 AM
But this is the problem: if you need illustrations to pattern-guess the solution, it's a one-way cipher. A large part of the VM text is without illustrations.