MarcoP wrote:Obviously positional characteristics of glyphs have little to do with languages or numbers and everything to do with the writing systems used to represent them.
Positional characteristics of glyphs (if they are numeric) have a great deal to do with numbers.
31 is not the same as 13. 143 is not the same as 413. VI is not the same as IV. Without the position, you can't interpret the numbers.
Yes, I agree that they have to do with the writing systems used to represent them, but I am not aware of any medieval writing system for numbers (I'm talking about a typical system that can represent a large set of numbers) that is not positional.
I suppose you could invent another way to show the priority (as with a marker glyph), or create individual glyphs for each number (in other words, 12 might be represented by one glyph rather than a systematic combination of 1 & 2), but if the VMS or any other undeciphered script is designed this way, it would be very difficult to decipher and quite unusual for the time (or even for the 16th century).