[split] Why the VMS text is meaningful or meaningless?

[ReneZ]

David, this question has been discussed a lot since the earliest years of the original mailing list.
Specifically, the linguist Jacques Guy has been concerned by the apparent fact that there is no way for linguists to decide if a piece of text (string of characters) is meaningful or not.

When looking at the older (pre-1960) material, i.e. letters exchanged between various interested people, this question does not seem to come up at all. From everything I have seen, the inherent meaning of the MS was a given, and it was just a matter of decoding it.