[split] Humanist handwriting in the MS?

[-JKP-]

The Latin ALPHABET and Latin SCRIBAL CONVENTIONS, including abbreviations, ligatures, numbers, etc., are used in many languages (French, German, Latin, Czech, Italian, Spanish, English, Scandinavian, etc.) and these shapes and conventions are strongly evident in the shape of the VMS glyphs.

That's the matter of script, not the matter of language. How could Marcis and Kirchers think about Voynichese as something coptic or something, if the scribal conventions are that apparent?

I've looked at the communications (although it's a while ago) and IF I remember correctly, they did not say Coptic, they said hieroglyphics. Now, in modern parlance, we use the term "hieroglyphics" to specifically mean Egyptian pictographic characters, whereas from what I can tell from reading medieval manuscripts, the word "hieroglyphics" was a more general term in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance for a variety of unfamiliar texts (not specifically or only Egyptian pictographic text)

Even if they said Coptic, Coptic did not mean pictographic (Egyptian) text, in the middle ages, I'm pretty sure even then it meant Egyptian written with Greek letters. Many of the Latin scribal conventions are direct descendants of Greek scribal conventions, some of them are identical, in fact, and a few of the VMS characters may be directly from Greek. So... even if the characters are primarily Latin (which they are, I don't even understand why there is argument about it), if Kircher and his buddies couldn't immediately READ the Latin glyphs (with Latin being a language they knew very well) and, since there are a few Greek conventions in VMS glyphs, they may have assumed it was a script (in their terms, a "hieroglyphic") from that general part of the world (e.g., southeast Mediterranean).