VMs: Re: VMS numbering systems hypotheses...

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> As promised, please find attached a short Word document containing my
> current hypotheses of how the VMS' primary numbering systems work.

> Please can I ask some of you to try this out yourselves, to see if it helps
> reveal any further structures or patterns in the text to you?

Structural analysis - this is what I like to see!

Some instant thoughts, jotted down in the Angel to a background of
noise from Korea.

Your introductory remarks about a well known language and layers of
encipherment seem sound to me.

The table of numerals from 1 to 100 is a plausible suggestion. The
ordering across the table is intuitive: the downwards ordering less
so (the arguments for identifying one row as 20, another as 80 are
not tremendously strong). Why should 30 and 40 be the very rare
combinations pe- and fe- while 50 is the very common She- ?

The table explains many of the frequent combinations which make
the Voynich words so repetitious, but not all of them. The transcription
of 78r simply ignores 'ol' and 'dy' and this is not satisfactory.

I am not attracted by the idea of dain, daiin etc as ounces - these
words are extremely common and I defy you to produce a text in which
'ounce' or 'oz' has a similar frequency, however broad the meaning of
the word used to be.

You suggest that 'qo' might mark out numerals used in a code book, and
this would explain why the combination is so rare in the star labels
and the marginalia. Presumably, then, the other numerals are supposed
to be used like letters in a homophonic substitution or similar scheme.
These are the lines I am working on myself. I have found that there is
no shortage of ways of converting Voynich text into numerals, but that
any given scheme turns out to be impossible to convert into a plausible
language (you always find yourself with seven consecutive consonants or
a common word like 'and' repeated three times). It is at this stage of
testing a hypothesis that the lack of long repeated sequences and the
internal structure of the line become important problems.

All in all, this strikes me as good work. It is not the solution but it
is the kind of thing I would expect a solution to look like, and it may
be an important halfway stage. I will certainly give some further study
to it.

Philip Neal




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