Syllabification

[Sam G]

It is not possible that words in the VMS represent a word in a natural language. (Or if we assume some kind of cipher a plain text word.)
(See Currier: "That’s just the point — they’re not words!" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

First, the weak word order can only mean that the words are not ordered by a grammar as we know for natural languages. 
I didn't think that it is plausible to to assume a language without grammar.

Second, the entropy is too low. Although the entropy is already low we have the line structure.
The line structure is accountable at least for a part of the entropy.

1) There's at least some word order in the VMS.  Also, some languages use inflection more than word ordering to express syntactic relationships, though perhaps there is not enough evidence of inflection in the VMS to rely on this explanation (or perhaps there is - there is certainly some evidence for word inflection).

I suspect that there are rules we are not aware of governing word order in the VMS, so that (for example) in some cases we might see a pair of words A B, but in a different context we will see same the pair B A.  German, for instance, has some rules like this that we don't have in English, but it would be incorrect to say that German has "weak word order".  So the "weak word order" in the VMS might also be only apparent.  The problem is that we don't know what the rules are.

I think the "writing style" of the VMS also probably plays a role here.  Many people tacitly assume that a prose style similar to that which we use to write English must be employed in the VMS, but this isn't the only possibility.  The writing style is probably "weird", too.  This affects a number of considerations about word order, repetitiveness, lack of repeated long phrases, etc.

2) From what I've read, there are natural languages with a lower entropy than the VMS, so there is not a big problem here, though I'm not sure exactly which entropy measure you are talking about, or how many languages and types of texts it has been tried on. What I said about writing style applies here, too.

As far as line structure, it seems that we have:

- Lots of <p> and <f> gallows in initial lines of paragraphs
- Addition of extra letters to the beginnings of lines
- Something weird going on at the ends of lines, notably a high frequency of words ending in <m> or <g>

These are often cited as examples of properties that "no natural language text has", and given all kinds of strange cryptological explanations, but actually these kinds of oddities seem to be fairly common properties of old (unencrypted) Latin manuscripts.  Galllows-like embellishments in initial lines of paragraphs in particular are very common, especially in legal manuscripts. (Why the VMS should have a characteristic primarily found in legal manuscripts is another interesting question.)  Probably we should be "removing" these features to get "ordinary" text, as we would do with a Latin manuscript, but it's obviously harder to do when we don't understand the language or the details of how these modifications work.  In any case, their presence does not demonstrate that the VMS is not a meaningful natural language text any more than they show that old Latin manuscripts are not meaningful natural language texts.