RE: No text, but a visual code
-JKP- > 20-05-2020, 02:46 AM
Yes, the Latin scribal conventions were still somewhat known in the late 16th century, although they were starting to disappear.
Latin scribal conventions in the 16th century
The printed book had a strong influence on the decline of scribal conventions. Most of the ligatures and abbreviations were dropped because they were hard to mimic with lead type. They kept a few of the most common ones, but those were gradually disappearing by the 17th century. Latin was disappearing, as well, and with it, the Latin scribal conventions. People bought books instead of copying them out by hand.
So, the well-studied scholars knew them. I've sampled a few handwritten texts from the late 16th century that demonstrate that some of the scribes still knew most of the conventions from the 15th century. But... overall, the later writers didn't see them as often and didn't know them as well.
So... the use of certain ligatures and abbreviations that are shaped like some of the glyphs in the VMS had mostly disappeared by the 17th century.
Knowledge of Greek
There were some people who were very interested in Greek (e.g., John Dee studied Greek and Hebrew, Kircher was a polyglot, and Greek was studied by some of the classical literature and theology students), but it was not a subject everybody studied. Even if they knew the Greek alphabet (which was often included in Latin manuscripts), they didn't always know Greek scribal conventions. You have to actually read manuscripts to learn those because different scribes apply them slightly differently.
Glyph shapes and their relationship (or lack of relationship) to language
But, knowing Latin and Greek shapes does not help one to read the VMS for two reasons... because it is not structured like natural language, and the two shape groups are combined in a way that is atypical (something both Marci and Kircher would have recognized). Recognizing shapes is not the same as reading it and if you couldn't read it in those days and the characters were unfamiliar (or combined in an unfamiliar way), the general term for foreign characters was "hieroglyphics" (today we use it to mean Egyptian characters).
So what about not being structured like natural language...
The shapes and whatever meaning the text might contain are not consistent with one another in the sense of letters and words. For example, there are no words in Latin or Greek (or other languages) with four of the same letters in a row, but this happens somewhat frequently in the VMS. It's even possible that the tail on "aiin" is an additional minim since a tail (connected macron) is how scribes added extra letters. If so, then it happens very frequently in the VMS.
It's also possible that ch is a ligature, a joined shape of two ee characters in a row. If so, then it happens very frequently in the VMS. This characteristic of replication and positionality are not properties of natural language (unless some significant secondary processing is applied to the glyphs, as in ciphertext), and judging by the little bit that Kircher wrote about the VMS, he seems to have recognized this, just as the code-breakers in the Study Group recognized this.
The VMS puts some of the characters in the same positions as Latin, but the smaller proportion that I believe may be derived from Greek, the ones that look like ligatures and abbreviations (and superposed characters), are not positioned as such. It seems more likely that the VMS glyph designer borrowed the shapes and concepts, but did not use them for their traditional function.
P.S., Antonio, the reason I posted about Greek was not in direct response to your posts, but rather to Ruby's post, since she introduced the topic of Greek letters. I know you already think that the glyphs have been re-purposed for other uses, but Ruby's blogs have been about linguistic solutions, which is a different approach from yours. I have been posting for quite a few years that some of the letters (especially the gallows characters) are inspired by Greek but that does not necessarily mean that the text is Greek.