On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[-JKP-]

Emma May SmithJKP, if you mean a pasigraphic system, then I suppose you are quite correct and that a linguistic analysis wouldn't be that helpful. But we're talking about a very limited exception. And I'm not sure that an extensive text could be written pasigraphically with such a limited character set. Something like Beck's codebook philosophical language would be needed.

I respect that as a line of research, though much like cryptological approaches I wonder if it's not demanding too much of the time period.

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A pasigraphic or syllabic system (or one that is partially so) is one possibility and I've blogged about that line of thought in the past. It would not be too demanding of the time period if the person who devised the system came from a culture where the language is constructed that way (as is true for many Asian and some African languages). The Asian mindset is quite different. In China, a proverb can be encoded in four characters and everyone knows what it means.

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As an aside on pasigraphic systems, there was a lot of interest in universal languages in the 17th and 18th centuries (Kirchner had a strong interest in this and his friends devised such languages). I suspect one of the reasons was because Latin, which had largely fulfilled this role for about 1,000 years (particularly in religious and commercial matters), was gradually falling out of use as the printing press made it possible for books (and Bibles) to be widely distributed in local languages, something that had been impractical when manuscripts were hand written. The protestant reformation had a big influence on this, as well, since the underlying philosophy was that the common people should be able to read the Bible without having to rely on priests to interpret it for them from Latin. Thus, Latin was fading and intercultural communication was becoming more difficult and interest in developing a universal language (which continued up to the development of Esperanto) increased.
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But to bring it back to the 15th century... pasigraphic systems are not all linguistic. The "languages" of science and mathematics or even of travel signs are, in a sense, pasigraphic—a scientist in Russia or China can read a mathematical formula (or a visual image representing "man" or "woman" next to a toilet) as well as one in Europe or North America. Scientific languages predate the pasigraphic systems of the 17th century by a few centuries. You can see them especially in medieval books of astronomy. They're not given much attention because most of the population is math-phobic. Add a few formulas or systems to a manuscript and much of the content gets overlooked. Cryptographic systems are sometimes hidden in those calendrical charts and I've come across a few numeric ciphers in otherwise normal texts. There are quite a few numbers in the VMS glyphs. That doesn't mean a numerical system underlies it, but it does mean that whoever devised it had enough interest in numbers to retain their shapes.

The VMS script is extremely systematic. Some ancient languages are that way too, before they were infused with loan-words from other cultures, but by the middle ages languages did not have this characteristic to this extent.