Just for the record, even though I'm supportive of this thread and believe it will provide interesting information and food for thought (it's a fun idea, actually), I don't think the VMS designer got the shapes from any particular source.
Latin scribal conventions are building blocks. You put them together however you want. As long as you have the basic "tools" (know the basic shapes), it doesn't matter how you combine them. Latin scribal conventions were flexible and scribes knew by context how to interpret them.
Obviously, in the VMS, the pieces were put together in a selective and rather regimented way for whatever purpose the designer wanted them to serve and the underlying information isn't necessarily narrative text and might not even be natural language (which might be why the text as a whole looks strange to people), but the building blocks themselves are not unusual—tails, loops, caps, macrons, and benched characters were all standard ways of abbreviating text and they used pretty much the same conventions in Naples as they did in England.
Latin scribal conventions are building blocks. You put them together however you want. As long as you have the basic "tools" (know the basic shapes), it doesn't matter how you combine them. Latin scribal conventions were flexible and scribes knew by context how to interpret them.
Obviously, in the VMS, the pieces were put together in a selective and rather regimented way for whatever purpose the designer wanted them to serve and the underlying information isn't necessarily narrative text and might not even be natural language (which might be why the text as a whole looks strange to people), but the building blocks themselves are not unusual—tails, loops, caps, macrons, and benched characters were all standard ways of abbreviating text and they used pretty much the same conventions in Naples as they did in England.