The top left hand loop of the gallows characters is a 4. Who disagrees?

[Mark Knowles]

JKP: Again, I think you miss my point. The question I am concerned with is not the function of a symbol, but rather what a symbol looks like visually. From my point of view the question I am interested in this context is if the Voynich "8" is visually speaking an "8", not what the function of the symbol "8" has.


If you take the context of the diplomatic ciphers that I am interested in then in general the symbols meanings don't correspond to external meanings, so my own interests are in visual identification.

But that's not what you said. You didn't say the shape was more like modern 8 than anything else, you said this:

Mark Knowles: ...though I think one can have some degree of confidence that an "8" is an "8"...

You said you were confident that "8" was "8". That's quite a different statement. We can not be confident that "8" was "8" because it was also medieval "s" and medieval "d".

If you only care about the shape, why didn't you say, "I would like to transcribe the d as "8" for my visual-similarity system." Then we would know what you were talking about.

The whole thread as I have already made clear is about visual similarity. It follows logically that the same applies to the "8".

I was discussing the "8" in passing as Helmut referred to it, but in this thread my focus is on the gallows characters, as I have made clear, so I don't want to get too sidetracked by focusing specifically on the "8" other than as part of the general point being discussed.