I've blogged about "monogram" style Greek letter and number combinations, mostly common ones like pi-rho, tau-rho, mu-rho, and chi-rho and stacked words like Prodromos. Some are stacked (one above the other), some are benched (like pi crossing the ascender of rho).
There are a number of ways of superposing them, but the important thing is that it is common in Greek scripts and less so in Latin scripts, except in Latin legal seals where it is fairly common.
These examples are not as good as the examples I posted on my blog from actual manuscripts, but they get across the idea of commonly benched (superposed) abbreviations:
and possible "stacking" in the VMS (EVA-p stacked on top of EVA-k):
Here is an example of a character in the VMS that resembles a double-gallows (perhaps two EVA-k in a row) that have been stacked in the same way as gamma-gamma is sometimes written as a ligature in Greek, with the letters joined and the right one raised like a staircase (this can be done with any combination of letters that are somewhat squarish and lend themselves to ligatures):
When I was creating transcripts, I noticed in a number of places that the ascenders of VMS benched-gallows characters do not always reach the baseline. This made me suspicious that benched-gallows chars might be ligatures. Here is an example of stacked rho-pi in a Greek manuscript where the stem does not go down through the pi character. It is stacked rather than superposed. Maybe this is why some of the VMS chars behave similarly:
. Note how the stem of p sits on ch rather than going to the bottom:
And here are some examples of the common theta-rho ligature that somewhat resembles EVA-t. Whether it swoops up and attaches to the next letter (in this case, alpha, omicron, and omega) depends on whether it is in the middle of the word or at the end of the word:
It's important to read for context when interpreting theta-rho because some scribes added loops to pi ligatures, as well. In this example, it's theta-rho.
I don't think the extra lines and loops on the fancy gallows chars are always embellishments, I think some of them may be ligatures. If they are, they have been done in the Greek style, not the Latin style.
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The majority of the VMS shapes have analogues in Latin. The glyph-shapes a i o y g ' m e c r s u b q l d eh k are all common except for the way the i leans back, but the gallows chars, as a group, seem to me to be more similar to Greek in the way they are shaped, and especially in the way they are combined.
There are a number of ways of superposing them, but the important thing is that it is common in Greek scripts and less so in Latin scripts, except in Latin legal seals where it is fairly common.
These examples are not as good as the examples I posted on my blog from actual manuscripts, but they get across the idea of commonly benched (superposed) abbreviations:
Here is an example of a character in the VMS that resembles a double-gallows (perhaps two EVA-k in a row) that have been stacked in the same way as gamma-gamma is sometimes written as a ligature in Greek, with the letters joined and the right one raised like a staircase (this can be done with any combination of letters that are somewhat squarish and lend themselves to ligatures):
When I was creating transcripts, I noticed in a number of places that the ascenders of VMS benched-gallows characters do not always reach the baseline. This made me suspicious that benched-gallows chars might be ligatures. Here is an example of stacked rho-pi in a Greek manuscript where the stem does not go down through the pi character. It is stacked rather than superposed. Maybe this is why some of the VMS chars behave similarly:
And here are some examples of the common theta-rho ligature that somewhat resembles EVA-t. Whether it swoops up and attaches to the next letter (in this case, alpha, omicron, and omega) depends on whether it is in the middle of the word or at the end of the word:
It's important to read for context when interpreting theta-rho because some scribes added loops to pi ligatures, as well. In this example, it's theta-rho.
I don't think the extra lines and loops on the fancy gallows chars are always embellishments, I think some of them may be ligatures. If they are, they have been done in the Greek style, not the Latin style.
---------
The majority of the VMS shapes have analogues in Latin. The glyph-shapes a i o y g ' m e c r s u b q l d eh k are all common except for the way the i leans back, but the gallows chars, as a group, seem to me to be more similar to Greek in the way they are shaped, and especially in the way they are combined.