A Numeric Solution

[Legit]

Even the most skeptical must admit:  the EVA-y is unmistakably the number 4.  If this is a 4, could EVA-o be a 0? 

Sorry, but those are just meaningless coincidences.  If you make up an alphabet from combinations of 1-3 simple pen strokes, it is almost guaranteed that some letters will look exactly like some letters of other alphabets.  Just by chance.

Japanese hiragana "HI" looks very much like Latin "U".  The Georgian letters for the sounds "o", "q", and "w" look like Latin "m", "y", and the digit "3". And so on...

Besides, a more common reading of Voynichese y in Latin manuscript is the abbreviation for the ending "-us".  You can see it in the VMS quire numbers, as "1y" for "primus", etc,  But of course y does not mean "-us" (or "4", or "9") in Voynichese text.

All the best, --stolfi

The Ms Barth (1460) sample numbers I've shown are from around the same time period and location as the manuscript is from.  The images in the VM and dating of the parchment place it at the same time period and in that region.

The presumed 4 is not just a similar shape.  It's exactly the same in detail.  You may notice that the left descender is longer than the right and hangs below the baseline of the text.
Likewise the descender on the 9 also hangs below the baseline of the letters and has the same curve in both the VM and the Ms Barth number 9.  The scribe who wrote the Ms Barth would certainly read those VM glyphs as a 4 and 9. 

A scribe who is well practiced, from the same time period and area as the VM would see looped 4's written exactly like the EVA-y in other manuscripts.  It would be unusual for the author of the VM to invent a character by coincidence that was already commonly used in other manuscripts around them at that time.

All translation attempts so far that use Latin number glyphs as abbreviations have been invalidated.  This is also why I am suggesting these number glyphs could be intended to be used as numbers.

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.

I was wondering about someone like Baresch.  Keeping in mind that Baresch was looking at the manuscript 2 centuries after it was written and the common number system was closer to what we use today, I'm not surprised he was confused.  The amount of information he would have had available was miniscule.  Drinking mercury and leach treatments didn't help either.