Choice of glyphs

[RenegadeHealer]

What does this tell us? It appears that the glyph set is mostly composed of numbers and scribal conventions. Those few that are found in the alphabet often double as a number or abbreviation. So the glyph set simultaneously:

- Avoids unambiguous characters from the alphabet. 
- Uses characters familiar to the Latin scribe.

The final point might also be of interest. The selection of known symbols likely meant that the writing system could be learned easily.
But why construct a glyph set that relies so heavily on numbers and abbreviation symbols?

Ease of learning and familiarity definitely seem like reasonable motivating factors for the design of a new character set, for any purpose. This was even more true in the days when at least one person was going to need to write a large amount of it by hand even once. Hangul, again, is a great example for comparison: designed entirely from scratch by a single individual, very logical and consistent, and clearly designed for, and by, people who learned all they knew about writing from the Chinese. (But decidedly not Chinese characters, despite the clear stylistic influence.)

It's a temptingly fun thought experiment to consider why someone would design a character set that maximized, rather than minimized, ambiguity. To blend in unnoticed to the majority of people who give it no more than a cursory look — to hide in plain sight — is the answer that comes most readily to me. I can think of several examples of communication that is designed to purposely fall into the uncanny valley of things we're not sure if we should have understood, from any of the 3 major theories regarding the VMS:

1. Meaningless filler designed to give the impression of being language-ish: I'm sure many non-native English speakers here recall hearing the song You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. before they learned English, and later being surprised to learn it's not real English. As a native English speaker, though, it's a creepy song; I feel as though I should understand it, and if I listen hard enough, I will. But no. Adriano Celentano mimicked the phonology and prosody of English quite well, even though he didn't speak it at all.
   
2. Cipher: Irish Travellers and carnival folk use a lot of short cryptic phrases to communicate things that are for insiders' ears only. Most are so briefly muttered and phonologically similar to English words, that listeners mistakenly think they merely misheard something unimportant. The term kayfabe, associated with the fictitious backstories and rivalries of professional wrestling, started as a signal for one carny to subtly remind another to stick to the story they'd agreed upon.
   
3. Natural language: The Cherokee alphabet was designed by Sequoiah, at a time when he could not speak, let alone read, any language written with the Roman alphabet. But wanted his people's language, when written, to blend in with the examples of English writing he first saw.
   

That last example feels forced, though. And what that makes me realize is, the hypothesis that the VMS glyph set was purposely designed to maximize ambiguity does not favor the idea that the VMS is written in a plaintext natural language.

I'm not cheering for the number hypothesis, as interesting and defensible as it may be, because it's as much if not more of a dead end than the meaningless-filler-hoax hypothesis. Even if the numbers could be parsed without ambiguity, unless we find something that strongly hints at a key, what could these numbers possibly refer to? Playing fill-in-the-blanks with a half-finished crib and Google Translate at least produces some cheap laughs at the sheer ridiculousness of the output. (A pox upon all of our livers, indeed!) So we decide the VMS is nothing but numbers. When this forum dwindles to a bunch of crackpots listing a verse of the King James Bible or a line of Dante's Inferno for every vord, I'm not sticking around.