Numberness and Letterness

[Gavin Chipper]

I was just thinking, is there any way of telling which symbols are numbers and which are letters just by looking at them? Is there a statistical pattern? If there was a new number or letter, would you have a better than 50% chance of guessing whether it was a number or letter? What makes a symbol obviously a number or a letter?

I generally think of numbers as more like upper case letters so you can start off by looking at them, but extend to lower case if you want.

[Charlie Reams]

I'd guess there are some pretty strong co-occurrence patterns you can probably use, assuming a system at least vaguely similar to the Arabic place system. If they can decipher Linear B then digits vs letters should be no problem.

[Gavin Chipper]

I'd guess there are some pretty strong co-occurrence patterns you can probably use, assuming a system at least vaguely similar to the Arabic place system. If they can decipher Linear B then digits vs letters should be no problem.

OK, cheers. But what would you say intuitively marks out say W as a letter and 6 as a number?