VMs: Re: More shorthand trivia

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > The one I was having problems with is the one at the top of the
    > ring, which looks like this:
    > 
    >      x  O    x
    >      x     x   x
    >      xxxxxx     x
    > 
    > [...] It's almost certain that the earlier form of the symbol
    > did not omit the "O" as Shelton did.

Someone (Rene, perhaps?) once observed that in 15th century Germany, at
least, the digit "7" was written like an uppercase Lambda, and that
"17" would be somewhat similar to the above symbol, minus the "o".

Rene provided this picture

  http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/misc/german3.gif
  
Check out the "17" in the leftmost column, near the man's neck.  

That could be dismissed as a meaningless coincidence, except that the
above sign is the 10th in a sequence os 17 symbols, which is repeated
4 times...

Perhaps the symbol means "107" or "10/17" or "17th" ("17º") or 
"17 degrees" or ...

BTW, how does one say "17th" in German? And in Czech?

Someone else suggested that Voynich was a Bolshevik agent, who planted
the VMS in order to distract those Capitalist cryptographers and drive
them insane.

There are times I can almost believe it...

All the best,

--stolfi