01-03-2023, 11:01 AM
(01-03-2023, 12:24 AM)Anton wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's more a question for specialists in, so to speak, languages with undeveloped scripts. I don't know if there are examples of languages that lack dedicated symbols for numerals in writing. Historically letters were used for numerals for a long time. This is true for Latin or e.g for Cyrillic stuff like Russian. And I think for Greek and Hebrew as well. That was basically the language's response to the challenge of not having dedicated symbols for digits. But even supposing one does not have dedicated symbols, he would not express it in this strange positional way. He would put it in writing just as he is used to it orally. If he says "twenty two", he would write "twenty two", not "two two".
Furthermore - of course I never paid much attention to it and I may be wrong - but I fancy that, in contemporary European MSs, digits (whether Arabic or Roman) are typically used in tables and drawings, while within the flow of text they are typically expressed "verbatim". Like, when one needs to say "three drops", he usually writes "three drops", not "3 drops".
Yeah this makes sense. Any natural language that has no designated symbols for numbers (either numerals or letters) will probably write them out verbatim. I'd guess that such a language would also be rare by the Middle Ages, since any culture to adopt writing would probably also adopt the numeral system to go along with it.
Now with Voynichese, I could still imagine a scenario where for example the year "1222" is converted to "one two two two" if the system included instructions for numerals. "If you encounter the numeral 2, write 'dain' or 'daiin'", or something like that. In such a case, the encoding mechanism would automatically lead to a deconstruction of "twelve hundred twenty two" into "one two two two", even though people would normally not think of it that way.