Re: No numbers in the VMS

[Giuliano Colla <copeca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Pelling wrote:
> 
> Hi Zachary,
> 
> >I seem to recall someone stating that there were no numbers
> >found in the VMS, I'm not too sure about letter frequencies, so I
> >was wondering how this conclusion was reached.
> >The reason I was wondering was how the search was done.
> >Was whoever figured this out doing it on a Base 10 numbering
> >system?  I recall that the greeks or romans used Base 12
> >and the Babylonians and Egyptians used like Base 60.
> >If the VMS was copied from an older source as it's believed,
> >wouldn't the numbering maybe be in another base.
> 
> If the VMS is in code, then it's a code that is designed to hide lots of
> things - for example, repeated letters ("ee" is almost certainly a
> composite letter), numbers, and perhaps even the underlying alphabet itself.
> 
> One idea is that the end sequences of (for example) ot- words could be
> numbers: the context (or perhaps some other hint in the text) may indicate
> what to do with it.
> 
> Any other suggestions for where numbers could have been hidden in the VMS?
> 
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

I've been following your discussions for a while, and I didn't find
mentioned an idea which came to me when I first met the VMS, and which
could answer to a number of questions, including where are hidden the
numbers.

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.

This fits quite well with the knowledge available in northern Italy in
the first centuries of the second millennium. (A number of flourishing
jewish communities, a number of scholars studying hebrew, which was a
mean to access many works of the arab scholars  - philosophers,
astronomers and mathematicians, and of course alchemists - translated in
hebrew) 

As you probably know, the hebrew alphabet doesn't contain vowels, but
only consonants, plus a number of _place holder_ no sound signs, used
when two vowels are near. The nicety of this scheme is that it's very
easy to encode, and hard to decode, for a number of reasons. You have
many different ways to write the same word, because you're actually
using an alphabet intended for a semitic language, based upon three
consonant roots, and you may freely play with place-holders, some almost
identical sounding consonants, some semi-consonants, which you may
choose to write as a consonant, or not. If you take a dictionary of
modern hebrew (which is not so different from the classical one), you
find a set of rules for writing foreign words, together with the note
that those rules will be followed except when there is an already
consolidated different tradition! Moreover, as you're forcing an
alphabet not intended for the language, words, even if composed only by
consonants, become almost as long as in the original language. If
anybody has ever seen an Yiddish text (basically a middle-age german
dialect written with the hebrew alphabet) can understand what I mean.

Some other items which help confusing the issue are some consonants
provided of different sound (P and PH, S and SH, K and KH, etc.) which
may be written with a different symbol or not, and a quite high number
of symbols (considering the lack of vowels), because five letters have
two shapes, one when in the middle of the word, the other at the end of
the word. You have 22 basic letters which become 27 if you consider the
ending shape, or up to 34 if you use a different symbol for letters with
different sound. If you consider only the letters which have a different
sound in the hebrew spoken in the Arab - spanish tradition (i.e. in the
mediterranean area), you need 30 symbols. Those values seem to fit quite
well with the VMS alphabet.

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.

If this idea hasn't been already tested and discarded, I believe it
worth of some consideration, because it appears to me to fit reasonably
well in the context where the VMS has originated, and could explain many
difficulties: such a scheme has many properties of a natural language
(because it is a natural language), but lacks some, because of the
peculiar treatment of vowels. 

-- 
Giuliano Colla