My thoughts on the VMS

[Diane]

Thomas,
What Marco says is correct.

This seems to be consistent with where some linguistic research about the ms is going.

I cannot give you links to all the persons concerned because I don't know which ones Marco meant - no names mentioned.

I do know that Don Hoffmann has been exploring agglutinative structures, of not exactly 'languages' in the formal sense.

I've also very recently published on other forms of text - technical-instructional - which employ strongly abbreviated forms and can be 'agglutinative' - but again not the formal sense.

We have similar forms in every day life e.g take 2gr NaCl.   But similar patterns emerge with any number of comparable technical-instructional texts including ones I've tested out such as numerical-coordinate series, or helmsman's orders, or knitting patterns and so forth.   If you wrote Latitude and Longitude without superscript you'd get, say 32o45N 33o24W ..
Given that (imo) the map is derived from a Hellenistic one and much of the imagery also, and on one folio is depicted what I have reasonable grounds to believe is an aid for the cosmographer, the Lat.Long. example isn't necessarily hypothetical, either.

Cheers.