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+--- Thread: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory (/thread-2697.html)
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - geoffreycaveney - 30-03-2019
(29-03-2019, 11:08 PM)davidjackson wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.OK, let's see if I can get this straight.
Your theory is that Voynichese is a transliteration of Judaeo-Greek, which I understand to be known more formally as Yevanic.
Yevanic is a dialect of Greek written using the Hebrew alphabet.
So far, so good. Yevanic is mutually intelligible with Greek; and the conquered Moors of Spain did the same thing with Arabic (the literary tradition of the aljamiadas). No doubt there are some differences, it isn't straight Greek, but I understand that essentially a Greek and a Yevanic can chat perfectly happily together.
Two questions thus occur to me. Maybe I'm just not understanding the system properly.
.
- Why the additional translation into the Greek alphabet? Essentially, the word is the same in Yevanic and Greek, just that two different scripts are used, unless we are looking at a dialect argot or Hebrew loan word. Are you saying that the user was a Greek writer who transliterated his text twice? Otherwise, we seem to have added an arbitrary layer of transliteration that isn't needed. Voynichese -> Yevanic -> Greek --> English can logically be distilled into Voynich -> Yevanic --> English.
If the underlying text is Greek, then we don't need Yevanic. If it is Yevanic, we don't need the Greek.
- The whole point of Yevanic was because the script was sacred to the users. They used the sacred Hebrew characters to write down their (new) mother tongue, ie Greek. Transliterating Hebrew into Voynichese defeats the purpose of this. What's more, I would assume that an orthodox Yevanic (Jew) wouldn't do this - they would go from Greek and keep the sacred script intact. Of course, this is subjective and we can't prove this. It is a consideration however - it seems more likely that the Greek variant word would have been used rather than the Yevanic. It also seems strange that they would not include the diacritics, and would invert the script direction (left to right as per Latin, rather than right to left as per Hebrew / Yevanic).
David, these are good questions, and the issues are important to discuss and consider and understand, and I appreciate them.
Yevanic or Judaeo-Greek is unfortunately extremely poorly attested. We know the language has existed as a colloquial spoken vernacular for millennia, but it was rarely written down at all, because those who spoke it, mainly did their reading and writing in Hebrew. Medieval vernacular Yevanic is essentially unattested in written form (unless the Voynich MS is written in it!). The oldest extant Yevanic text is a 1547 polyglot Bible in Hebrew, Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), and Yevanic. We also have medieval Greek translations of the Bible written in the Hebrew script, but they are not in Yevanic per se. Still they provide information about how the Greek language was written in Hebrew letters.
Thus the only way to proceed is to make a series of plausible hypotheses about how medieval vernacular Yevanic would have been likely to have been written, if and when it was written. To do this we have to make use of our much more extensive knowledge of medieval Greek, although here too medieval vernacular Greek is not nearly as well attested as other registers, and also not nearly as well attested as vernacular Greek in other periods both more ancient and more modern. Strikingly, I have read that some scholars have used even more modern information about Yevanic, as a source of information for sound changes in medieval vernacular Greek, because Yevanic did not attempt to preserve classical Greek spellings in the same way that most medieval Byzantine Greek writers did!
In short, we "need the Greek" because our sources of information about it are many orders of magnitude more abundant than our sources of information about Yevanic. Then we must hypothesize about what the medieval Yevanic forms would have been likely to have looked like. I note that Ventris & Chadwick essentially did the same thing for Mycenaean Greek in their successful decipherment of Linear B. They certainly didn't have any other attested examples of Mycenaean Greek to compare it to!
David, I will reply to your second point later, as soon as I have the time to do so. Thank you again for your very important questions, about issues that we will need to understand much better if we are to make significant progress in this direction.
Geoffrey
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - Koen G - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - geoffreycaveney - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - -JKP- - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - geoffreycaveney - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - davidjackson - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - -JKP- - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - Koen G - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - MarcoP - 30-03-2019
RE: geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory - davidjackson - 30-03-2019