The Impossibility of Double Gallows

[david]

The trouble with that, Anton, is that we always know that Roman numerals can be combined in any order.

We cannot assume that with the glyphs.

A better example may be that of, say, Hebrew, where letters can double as numbers. So letters can be combined to form words; or they can be combined to form numbers, which in turn can double as words. (that's the basis of numerology, by the way). It seems that sometimes you get words that don't mean anything, but they are in fact numbers. Ancient Greek had the same system for a while.

But I don't agree that Voynichese incorporates this system into its grammar - glyph placement is too non-trivial for the language to be gemetrian. Also, most gematrian languages (ie Hebrew) include a special marker when a word is actually a number.

So I tend to agree with Emma here - the number of occurrences appear to be statistically insignificant.

Emma, you said:

6) Their similar role and their similar appearance suggests that whomever invented the Voynich script did so with a clear understanding of not only how the underlying language worked, but also how languages in general work. The gallows itself as a character category is also a linguistic category. [emphasis mine]

What did you mean by that?