A key to understand the VMS

[Sam G]

It's not just that all vords are similar to all other vords (which perhaps pinyin can match).  It is that vord similarity has spacial patterns on the pages of the VMS.  If you took a random Mandarin text written in pinyin and applied the spatial test, would you really see a similar pattern to the VMS?

I'm not sure which spatial patterns you're referring to, but there are some posts in the VMS list archives by Jorge Stolfi showing that reduplication in the VMS occurs at a similar frequency as it does in East Asian languages.

Also, isn't one reason that pinyin words are spelled similarly to other pinyin words the fact that pinyin is not a native script for Mandarin, and thus similar but distinct sounds get lumped together under the romanization of the script?

Mainly in the case of vowels, but I think you could replace pinyin with IPA and see the same basic phenomenon.  It's an intrinsic fact about the syllable structure.

Also, do we want to entertain the possibility that the VMS is written in Mandarin?  I mean, I guess anything is possible at this point, but in any case Mandarin would only be a relevant comparison if you think that the VMS could be written in Mandarin.

It's definitely not written in Mandarin, but it's a relevant comparison because Torsten has effectively asserted that these properties of the VMS text prove that it cannot be a natural language text, yet these properties can be found in Mandarin Chinese, at least if we ignore tone and treat each syllable as a separate word.  Of course, modern Mandarin has tones and polysyllabic words.  So you could argue that representing Mandarin in this way is not "valid", but then again we don't know if the VMS script completely represents its language either.  It's fairly common for scripts to be incomplete in some way.

The point is not that it's the same in every respect, just that the same basic properties can be found in other written representations of known languages, so the arguments presented by Torsten that the VMS text can't be a written representation of a human language don't look so strong after all.