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RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - geoffreycaveney - 16-03-2019
(16-03-2019, 11:17 AM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The fourth step of Geoffrey's translation, where he tries to make sense of the set of Greek words that he picked as similar to his mapping of Voynichese, states that "eipan oun" means "as they said". I don't know Greek, so looking into his translation is about as difficult for me as working with Yokubinas' translation based on Hebrew.
Greek-English dictionaries point out that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does not mean "as" but "then" / "therefore". It is used to link two sentences either temporally or causally.
"eipan oun" is a legal Greek sequence. It occurs several times in the Gospel of John meaning something like "therefore they said:". It requires both a previous sentence corresponding to the cause (or the temporal precedent) of what is said, and a following sentence (to which modern transcriptions add double quotes) corresponding to what is said.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 21 Καὶ ἠρώτησαν αὐτόν Τί οὖν σὺ Ἠλίας εἶ Καὶ λέγει Οὐκ εἰμί Ὁ προφήτης εἶ σύ Καὶ ἀπεκρίθη Οὔ 22 Εἶπαν οὖν αὐτῷ Τίς εἶ ...
[21] kai ērōtēsan auton: ti oun? su Ēlias ei? kai legei: ouk eimi. ho prophētēs ei su? Kai apekrithē: ou. [22] eipan oun auto: tis ei? ...
They asked him, "Then who are you? Are you Elijah?" He said, "I am not." "Are you the Prophet?" He answered, "No." 22 Finally they said, "Who are you? ...
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 52 Ἐπύθετο οὖν τὴν ὥραν παρ’ αὐτῶν ἐν ᾗ κομψότερον ἔσχεν εἶπαν οὖν αὐτῷ ὅτι Ἐχθὲς ὥραν ἑβδόμην ἀφῆκεν αὐτὸν ὁ πυρετός
epuqeto oun thn wran par autwn en h komyoteron escen eipan oun autw oti ecqes wran ebdomhn afhken auton o puretos
52 Then he inquired of them the hour when he got better. And they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.”
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 11 Ταῦτα εἶπεν καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο λέγει αὐτοῖς Λάζαρος ὁ φίλος ἡμῶν κεκοίμηται ἀλλὰ πορεύομαι ἵνα ἐξυπνίσω αὐτόν 12 Εἶπαν οὖν οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτῷ Κύριε εἰ κεκοίμηται σωθήσεται
11:11 tauta eipen kai meta touto legei autois lazaros o filos hmwn kekoimhtai alla poreuomai ina exupnisw auton 11:12 eipan oun oi maqhtai autw kurie ei kekoimhtai swqhsetai
11 These things He said, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.” 12 Then His disciples said, “Lord, if he sleeps he will get well.”
Clealy the stock phrase "as they said" must have equivalents in Greek. A similar example I could find is :
νόθος δὲ πρὸς μητρός, ὡς λέγουσιν· Ἀβρότονον
nόthos dè pròs mētrόs, hōs légousin Abrόtonon
He was baseborn from the part of his mother, who was as they say, Avrotonon
Plutarch (Themistocles)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is indeed the word that one expects to see as corresponding to the English conjunction "as"
I have seen no evidence from actual Greek texts of any time proving that "eipan oun" can end a sentence with the meaning of "as they said". Until such evidence is provided, I confirm that the proposed translation appears to be arbitrary and the sequence of Greek words on which it is based ungrammatical.
Marco, it is also possible that my interpretation of the last word of the line as "oun" is incorrect, but the rest of the line may still be correct. I am not wedded to the "oun".
In a 15th century late medieval / Byzantine Greek text, especially if it is a Judaeo-Greek text, there are going to be some words that have not necessarily been previously attested in any surviving text. The Voynich ms was written literally within a few decades of the fall of Constantinople and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. Do we have extensive documentation of *15th century* Byzantine Greek? I doubt it. And we must have even less documentation of 15th century Judaeo-Greek.
Here is another possibility: Perhaps I was wrong about the first word "geio-pan" as well. Koen already pointed out a big problem with it. Well, perhaps the first letter, the Voynich gallows letter [t], is not an actual letter in the text at all, but just a "pilcrow" paragraph marker. JKP has pointed to this theory, as he mentioned in a recent comment on this forum.
In this case, perhaps the first word is also intended to represent "eipan", "they said". Now I know we have the extraneous letter [o] in this case, but as I said, a Judaeo-Greek text written by a scribe whose literary background was the Hebrew script would not be expected to be very precise with the Greek vowels! [o] has kind of a strange distribution in the Voynich manuscript in any case; perhaps a large number of [o]'s in the ms are extraneous. It is just an idea.
(The Greek masculine nominative singular definite article "o" could justify a substantial number of the initial [o]'s in the ms, but still, the number of initial [o]'s in the Voynich ms is rather extremely large. And the character [o] occurs in 58% of all word tokens in the entire ms. Perhaps it may signify something other than an actual letter in some instances.)
If we take the first word as "eipan", then we have the first line as "eipan tis ipeirous otan skiiais tis eipan oun", if we maintain "oun". Now we may read the first six words as one clause, "they said when the continents are in the shadows," and the last two words as the beginning of the next clause, "then they said". This syntax would actually match your examples of "eipan oun" that you cited rather closely! Again, it is just another idea.
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - geoffreycaveney - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - Linda - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - geoffreycaveney - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - geoffreycaveney - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - MarcoP - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - geoffreycaveney - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - MarcoP - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - geoffreycaveney - 16-03-2019
RE: interesting Greek reading of 1st line of f67r 1 - -JKP- - 16-03-2019