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

[Mark Knowles]

So it's like... we take the number 4 but forget about its meaning and origin until it becomes a meaningless form and then see whether it looks like the VM shape?

Essentially, yes.

Then and only then once we have answered that question we can move to a more general comparison. But first before doing that we have to establish what it looks like visually. My purpose is this thread was around establishing what the gallows character looks like visually.

Only once these have been achieved can we start comparing it with other sources. I am very interested in comparison with other sources if a consensus is arrived at at what it looks like visually, but that comparison itself falls otherside of this thread. I am trying to break the problem up into smaller parts.

My motivation in this subject is similarities between the gallows characters and diplomatic cipher alphabets, however that specific comparison is not the purpose of this thread. I have tried to keep the subject matter of the thread narrow and focussed.