Re: Ancient number-encoding formats...

["Zachary Owen" <zowen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One thing that that site doesn't take into account is that the double
letters in Hebrew (The Finals), such as Kap (Kaph) - 20, Mim (Mem) - 40,
Noon (Nun) - 50,  Pe - 80, and Sadhe (Tzaddi) - 90,  have two different
numerical values depending on their location in the word you're checking.
If they are the final letter in the word, their value is actually higher
Kap - 500, Mem - 600, Nun - 700, Pe - 800, Tzaddi - 900.
This only happens when they're at the end of the word.  Check out this link
for more info
http://kabbalah-web.org/engkab/zohar/REDEMPTION.htm
-Zach Owens


Hi everyone,

Here is a page explaining how numbers were encoded in Hebrew and Greek:-

           http://www.theomatics.com/theomatics/struct.html

BTW, "theomatics" is basically a gematria-based thing that, 25 years ago,
came out of Portland, OR.

Similarly for Chaldean,
http://members.aol.com/chaldeans7/people/language.htm (the link may be
broken, so use Google's cache or http://www.archive.org to get it) says:-

           Alap Beth Gamal Daleth He Waw Zain Heth Teth
           Yoth Kap Lameth Mim Noon Semkath Ey Pe Sadhe
           Qpe Resh Sheen Taw
-->
           1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
           10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
           100 200 300 400

Note that numbers that fit within the respective ranges
(Chaldean/Aramaic/Hebrew = 1...499, Greek = 1...899) have the property of
not requiring doubled letters! This would fit the pre-1500 ciphertext
paradigm (that the Voynich seems to work within) very well.

I think that if numbers in the VMS are encoded using a system something
like these, then they should be basically crackable - after all, the
page-numbering system in the Codex Seraphinianus was the first (and only?)
thing to be broken. :-)

But I do have one unanswered question: in these numbering systems, can
anyone say how out-of-range numbers were traditionally written? If you're
writing a date in years since Creation onto a wedding contract, I'm pretty
sure you'd need to go higher than 499. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....