It would be so elegant. You could also read ‘daiin’ differently
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namely as d a i n
then ‘aiin’ would be ‘a i n’
‘ain’ would be ‘an’
Assuming that d=t/ts (in Bavarian, initial s hardens to ts, so sein = tsain)
‘aiin’ = ‘ein’: Count all tokens containing ‘aiin’ in the VMS EXCEPT ‘daiin’ tokens. Count all words in Middle High German containing ‘ein’, including the Bavarian variants (at the beginning, in the middle, at the end) — i.e. ‘ein’, ‘eine’, ‘einem’, ‘wein’, ‘bein’, “kleine”, ‘seinen’, etc.
daiin = ‘sein’: Count all tokens containing daiin in the VMS. Count all forms of the verb sein (ist, bin, bist, sind, sint, war, sei, si, sin, sein... including the Bavarian variants) PLUS all words containing ‘sein’ (seinen, seiner...) in the MHD.
ain = ‘an’: Count all tokens in the VMS that end in ain EXCLUDING aiin/daiin. Count all words in the MHD that contain ‘an’ (an, man, wann, dann, hand, lang...).
Here is the astonishing result:
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It fits surprisingly well; only ‘aiin’ is skewed, but in the ‘recipes’ you can see that it wouldn’t be impossible if the VMS were to be recipe-like. But what would that have to do with a cipher? An interesting question, because then it would essentially be plain text.
Could it really be that simple?
I have my doubts, which is why I wrote “it would be so elegant” in the subjunctive above. There is another reason why I’m raising this here at all:
The longer I work with the VMS as a German manuscript, the more I get the impression, as has already been suggested here several times, that the VMS is not a cipher in the strict sense at all, but perhaps simply an attempt at stenography – a form of stenography that never caught on....
So I asked myself what forms of stenography existed:
Tironian notes (the dominant system)
The only truly codified shorthand system still known around 1400. Origin: Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, c. 63 BC. Scope: up to 13,000 characters in its medieval form.
Structure:
Letter-ligature principle: basic characters are modified by additional strokes, loops and hooks
A mixture of syllabic and word characters. Not a pure alphabet, but a mixed system of logograms, syllabic characters and abbreviation rules: Direction: left to right, no reversal. This does not fit at all due to the reduced number of glyphs in VMS, although some Tironian notes bear certain similarities to individual VMS glyphs.
The system was still partially in use in Germany around 1400 (St. Gallen apparently still had a large Tironian corpus) but died out in the 15th century.
Scribal abbreviations (not a stenography system in the strict sense)
Not stenography but functionally similar: highly developed abbreviation conventions in medieval manuscripts.
Various types:
Contractions: first and last letters of a word, rest omitted, with an abbreviation mark above
Suspensions: word breaks off, rest implied
Superscript characters: superscript letters replace syllables
Special symbols: e.g. the Tironic ‘et’ sign (resembling a 7), which survives to this day as ‘&’ (here possible the eva S)
These conventions were largely standardised in Latin texts, but varied regionally in vernacular texts. There are some indications in the VMS that Latin abbreviations were known. Here, of course, a scribe might have attempted to adapt such a system to German.
Personal / idiosyncratic systems 
This is where it becomes relevant for VMS research:
There is no conclusive evidence of a standardised German-language stenography system in the early 15th century.
But:
Individual scholars and doctors developed personal abbreviation systems for notes, collections of prescriptions and lecture notes
These were not codified, could not be taught, and were not passed on
University environments (e.g. Vienna, Prague, Heidelberg, Krakow) produced such personal systems
Medical practitioners (barbers, surgeons) had their own abbreviation habits for prescription formulas.
That would, of course, fit perfectly.
Characteristic of personal systems around 1400:
Almost always based on one’s own handwriting as a starting point
- Often vowel reduction (vowels omitted or replaced by diacritical marks) – because the consonant structure identifies the word. In the VMS we probably have vowels.
- Syllable abbreviations rather than letter abbreviations – this is where it gets interesting, of course, but precisely this would naturally be difficult to substantiate historically for the VMS, because such papers were usually not kept if no one could understand them anymore.
But: Perhaps one should look more closely at this aspect of ‘encryption’ than at cryptology...
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