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Re: No numbers in the VMS

Hi Giuliano,

A simple yet very hard to decipher device is the following.
You take a text in a plain language, e.g. latin. Then you write it using
the hebrew alphabet. Finally you represent each letter of the hebrew
alphabet with some symbol of your choice.

There have been many variations on this general theme suggested over the years: it's possible to mount a fairly convincing rebuttal on the grounds that the statistical entropy of the text is too low - bear in mind that losing vowels would tend to make the text more dense (rather than less)... hence higher entropy, not lower.

Statistics are fallible: but my own instinct is that a reductive "lose-the-vowels" code doesn't fit with what I see, which is a very vowel-heavy text. OK, this could be misdirection, but I don't think so. :-/

A reasonable argument against Egyptian, Greek, and Roman numerals (apart from the basic dating evidence) is the absence of repeated letters in the text ("ee" aside) - so it's fairly likely that numbers are either encoded using letters (as you suggest) or using a specific coding representation (as I suggest). Or perhaps there could be some kind of middle ground...

Coming finally to numbers, numbers in hebrew are traditionally written
using the numerical value of the letters, but combining them in such a
way as to produce a word which can be pronounced. So, for instance the
number 15 is usually written as TW (I'm use a standard latin alphabet
transliteration), which can be pronounced "too", and results from the
numerical value 9 of T and 6 of W. T+W = 9+6 = 15. The numerical value
of words is the base for all the Cabalistic lore. This makes almost
impossible to detect numbers in a hebrew text using statistical
analysis, because numbers can't be told apart from words.

.....like this! It's completely possible that (for example) ot- words could be followed by this kind of number-scheme. Once we get a better grasp of the VMS morphology, we ought to experiment with this & see how far it goes.

Can you point us to a place where this (Sephiroth?) is described?

Thanks, .....Nick Pelling.....