When we see something like polkeedal it's just natural for the brain to want to process it as text.
For example, it's so easy to see it as Nox horas (substitution cipher) if one decides that EVA-l can be both x and s (this kind of one-to-many decryption is common among Voynich "solutions"). With this moderately simple substitution, you can make thousands of words. I have no trouble at all finding words and phrases in several languages doing it this way. But the emerging words are like islands that don't quite connect. The bridges are missing.
So, perhaps the strange parts in between are nonsense text, or numbers, or perhaps the bridges aren't there because it's NOT text (at least not on the upper level). Now... numbers can be resolved into text, obviously, but numbers can be written in a way that you have to do it in a two-step process so you can't go directly from A to C as you would if it were straight substitution. If there are additive processes or different combinations to create the same numerals, then it has to be A to B to C.
I don't think it's intended to be added up like Kabbalah. Kabbalah is not an encryption system. It's a way of looking for spiritual correspondence between words with the same values. That's completely different from encryption.
If the glyphs are numbers, then there's a dilemma, even if it resolves to text in another step... these number systems have many different versions. In some, "o" means zero, in some "o" means 5, and so on for many of these shapes. Are the cee shapes 100s? They would be in some systems, but not in others. Or maybe, if they are numbers, they have been assigned in a personal way, with no specific dependence on other number systems.
I have pages and pages of notes where I tried to resolve the seeming-numbers into letters, but there are so many ways to do it for so many different languages, it's an almost intractable problem.
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The process of designing the Voynichese glyphs does seem very rational. One of the reasons I pointed out to Emma that there are flaws in the Takahashi transcription is because there are sequences of eeee that Takahashi didn't record (as though he were reluctant to acknowledge that the shape could occur four times in a row, which would be pretty strange in a linguistic system). But if it were a numeric system, and if the minims iiii were intended as numbers, in a system with as much internal consistency as Voynichese, eeee not only would not be strange, it would be expected.
For example, it's so easy to see it as Nox horas (substitution cipher) if one decides that EVA-l can be both x and s (this kind of one-to-many decryption is common among Voynich "solutions"). With this moderately simple substitution, you can make thousands of words. I have no trouble at all finding words and phrases in several languages doing it this way. But the emerging words are like islands that don't quite connect. The bridges are missing.
So, perhaps the strange parts in between are nonsense text, or numbers, or perhaps the bridges aren't there because it's NOT text (at least not on the upper level). Now... numbers can be resolved into text, obviously, but numbers can be written in a way that you have to do it in a two-step process so you can't go directly from A to C as you would if it were straight substitution. If there are additive processes or different combinations to create the same numerals, then it has to be A to B to C.
I don't think it's intended to be added up like Kabbalah. Kabbalah is not an encryption system. It's a way of looking for spiritual correspondence between words with the same values. That's completely different from encryption.
If the glyphs are numbers, then there's a dilemma, even if it resolves to text in another step... these number systems have many different versions. In some, "o" means zero, in some "o" means 5, and so on for many of these shapes. Are the cee shapes 100s? They would be in some systems, but not in others. Or maybe, if they are numbers, they have been assigned in a personal way, with no specific dependence on other number systems.
I have pages and pages of notes where I tried to resolve the seeming-numbers into letters, but there are so many ways to do it for so many different languages, it's an almost intractable problem.
.
The process of designing the Voynichese glyphs does seem very rational. One of the reasons I pointed out to Emma that there are flaws in the Takahashi transcription is because there are sequences of eeee that Takahashi didn't record (as though he were reluctant to acknowledge that the shape could occur four times in a row, which would be pretty strange in a linguistic system). But if it were a numeric system, and if the minims iiii were intended as numbers, in a system with as much internal consistency as Voynichese, eeee not only would not be strange, it would be expected.