Re: No numbers in the VMS

["Robert Firth" <robertjf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ancient Numbers

In approximate chronological order:

The Egyptians used special characters for numbers,
and counted by tens.  Thus 321 would be 3 copies of
the "hundred" character, two of the "ten" character, and
one of the "one" character.  This makes numbers very
obvious in the text, since the same character is repeated
many times.

The Babylonians were the first to use real "based" numbers,
ie with the same character but a value depending on
position, and their base was indeed 60.

The Greeks used letters for numbers, later putting a little
diacritical mark over them, and also counted by tens.
Thus, alpha=1, beta=2, iota=10, kappa=20, ... If that
looks wrong, remember they kept the digamma to
stand for 6, even after it had fallen out of use in the
language.

This makes numbers pretty hard to spot unless
you know the underlying language, and can tell
that "kappa beta" means 22 because there is no
word "kb".  This scheme would make numbers
almost impossible to spot in the VMs unless we
saw some kind of tableau or counting sequence.
A multiplication table, for instance, should be fairly
easy to identify and decode.

The Romans of course used their funky MDCLXVI
letter sequence, which again is easy to identify.

Our conventional "arabic" numbers were introduced
into the West by Leonardo of Pisa (ca 1175 - 1250),
in ample time for the Voynich author to learn about
them.

Finally, the Mayans used base 20 for their "long
count", except the second digit position stood for 18.
So I was born on 12.16.11.6.1, and again the numbers
were the first things deciphered in the Mayan script.

Bottom line?  If there are no numbers in the VMs,
we probably won't find any.  If there are numbers but
the author wanted to conceal them, he had the Greek
scheme ready to hand and could make it impenetrable
by having a couple of alternatives for each digit.  Or he
could simply have spelled them out.

And if there are conventional modern numbers, we
would have found them.

TTFN
Robert