What are the characteristics of Labelese?

[Koen G]

Anyway (unless I have made some major mistake) we can say that the set of one-word labels is almost totally disjoint from the set of the 10 most frequent words.

It's fascinating that the VM labels behave quite well according to what we'd expect of labels. 
For multi-word labels it's quite natural to mix word types. For example, a plant labelled "lily of the valley" combines two infrequent nouns with two very frequent function words.
Or the traditional labels in the older wheels of Fortune with kings; these are three single-word labels and one three-word label which includes a common verb:

• regno
  
• regnavi
  
• regnabo
  
• sum sine regno