(08-02-2016, 12:52 AM)Oocephalus wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Could it be that the VMS was written by a person who could not read Latin, but got their hands on some Latin MS and created their own alphabet based on the symbols they found there without understanding their original meaning? Either to create a meaningless imitation of text or for recording their own language (or an invented one), similar to how Sequoyah created the Cherokee script based on English letters whose meaning he did not know....
It has crossed my mind a few times that someone might see an alphabet they didn't know (perhaps in an herbal), one for which they didn't fully understand the letter construction (for example, a European trying to transcribe unfamiliar letters from Ethiopian, Syrian, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Malaysian), assigned characters to what they perceived as individual shapes, and "copied" the text without interpreting the characters correctly.
It's not the most likely scenario, but I think the possibility has to be considered.