(03-01-2026, 08:57 PM)Legit wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VM would have appeared much more familiar to a reader at the time it was written as a book of codes to be deciphered and not seen as a language to be translatable into any other written or spoken language.
I'm not sure about this.
The closest opinion we have to that of medieval scribes chronologically would be that of Baresch in the XVII century, in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. he refers to "unknown characters" and "unknown script", never mentioning codes or numbers. (It must be said that not everyone agrees that Baresch was referring to the Voynich Manuscript.)
What is more, the most common 10 glyphs (counting ligatures) of the manuscript are:
o e ch y a d i k l r
Of these only l looks like a clear digit and d more like a digit, but can also be s in various scripts, if I'm not mistaken. o and y on their own would look more like letters/abbreviations than digits and I don't think r as written in the MS looks anything like a normally written digit at all. So, I don't think this will immediately look like a number based code book to a medieval scribe.