the comparison of sh and ch

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I think we wanted to focus primarily on the Indo-European language family.

Again, I propose that this is the reason why in 400+ years no one has produced a convincing translation/decryption of a single word.  The Scribe was almost certainly European, the materials and instruments are European. the layout of the text and letter shapes are European... but all that does not imply that the Author was European, nor that the language is European, nor nor that the contents is a product of European culture.

By the way: while the Greek and Egyptians did some alchemy, the biggest advances were made during the Baghdad Caliphate, the "Golden Age" of Islamic science, in the 700s.  It was then that Jabir Bin Hayyam ("Geber" in Latin texts) perfected the retort and used it to discover the sulfuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acids.  And he also discovered that a mixture of the last two, now called "acqua regia", was the first substance other than mercury capable of dissolving gold.  Another Caliphate alchemist, Abu Bakr al-Razi ("Rases"), used the retort to prepare pure alcohol (ethanol).  

The "art" of alchemy exploded in Europe only after the the work of those and other Caliphate alchemists were translated into Latin.  IIRC the first translations were done in Italy in the ~1200s, and from there spread to the rest of Europe.  The obsession of European alchemists with gold making was surely the result of the discovery of aqua regia, and of Jabir's reworking of the theory of Elements of Aristotles.  This reformulation implied that one could change a metal into another metal by rearranging its internal properties.  All that was left was finding a way to do that.

Apart from trying to make gold, it seems that another very popular alchemical process in the European Middle Ages was the preparation of another "acqua", the "acqua vitae" or distilled liquor.  

I personally do not think that the VMS is in Arabic or contains any alchemy.  But still, even if one believes that it is an "European" book, one should consider Arabic as a candidate language, and Arabic books as a possible source of the contents -- because they were to alchemy sort of what Italian is to pasta...

All the best, --jorge