That such apostrophe?

[Sam G]

After a conversation with Diane about this subject, I am switching my opinion of the script as being based on Latin to Greek. That such apostrophe on word-initial "40" is found, for example, on the top left word of this image:

...

I'm sold.

At the very least, this might imply that the scribe was used to writing Greek and thought of VM "40" as the same.

What I tend to think now is that the script we see in the VMS is a Latin-based script that was created to transcribe the text (which must have previously been written in some other script, possibly Greek-based) when this material was transmitted to Western Europe.  It's possible that the creation of this new script involved mapping some aspects of the previous script to their nearest Latin equivalents, which could account for the similarity of the apostrophe in Sh (which is also a normal Latin abbreviation for "circ") to certain aspects of Greek paleography (if necessary).