Some letters aren't letters

[Sam G]

The case of q is even more interesting.


This character appears exclusively at the start of words, and is essentially always followed by o.
Furthermore, it is quite frequent.
Thirdly, the same words without the leading q also occur.
Then, finally, it is not used in label words.

Mapping this character to any plain text letter simply cannot work.

There's really no problem at all with a sound that can only occur at the beginning of words, and the absence in labels is easily explained if q is a prefix that serves a grammatical function used in writing sentences that is not needed in labeling individual items.

The VMS text cannot be a verbose encoding of a European language because the words are too short, and even if you ignore spaces there are not enough long repeated sequences.  The labels obviously can't be verbosely encoded.  There's no way around this.

A verbose encoding of a monosyllabic language could still be a possibility (though it's not really what I think is going on).

Also, there's a pattern where qokol is more common than okol, but otol is more common than qotol, and this pattern is found in many sets of words sharing the same ending.  This shows that there is some kind of relationship between the words okol qokol otol and qotol (and among the words in other four-word sets of this type) that is going to be hard to explain as something other than the intrinsic grammar/morphology of some kind of language.