In my opinion, if you take the glyphs character by character (as individual entities) and read the spaces as literal, then the patterns do not resemble natural language in terms of frequency, or in terms of the glyph positions within words, or in terms of proximity to neighboring glyphs.
If there is natural language in the VMS, some kind of processing seems to me to be absolutely essential to unravel or reconstruct it (I don't know which and it may even be a two-step process, or perhaps there is something in the shape variations that carries meaning that is not being recorded in transcripts).
In other words, I do not believe that the glyphs are chosen for convenience to represent sounds in a language that might be extinct or might not have had a written alphabet. You can't just read it by relating the characters to different sounds. I think it is a devised character set (in the sense of being analytical rather than evolving from spoken words).
Something is MISSING if one tries to do a literal interpretation into natural language, and something is INCONSISTENT about the way the patterns line up (it reminds me of ciphers where you shift the corresponding key every few words or sentences EXCEPT it doesn't seem applicable here because the positional-patterns would shift as well and they don't).
After saying this, I do sometimes wonder, however, if there is an occasional real-word here or there (e.g., loanwords from another language?) but it's so easy for a large block of text (200 folios) to include a certain percentage of natural-language patterns by sheer coincidence, that I think this might be a chimera, an artifact of the text-generation process. I also sometimes wonder if there are a few phrases artfully hidden within filler, but if they are, they are dashedly difficult to tease out.
If there is natural language in the VMS, some kind of processing seems to me to be absolutely essential to unravel or reconstruct it (I don't know which and it may even be a two-step process, or perhaps there is something in the shape variations that carries meaning that is not being recorded in transcripts).
In other words, I do not believe that the glyphs are chosen for convenience to represent sounds in a language that might be extinct or might not have had a written alphabet. You can't just read it by relating the characters to different sounds. I think it is a devised character set (in the sense of being analytical rather than evolving from spoken words).
Something is MISSING if one tries to do a literal interpretation into natural language, and something is INCONSISTENT about the way the patterns line up (it reminds me of ciphers where you shift the corresponding key every few words or sentences EXCEPT it doesn't seem applicable here because the positional-patterns would shift as well and they don't).
After saying this, I do sometimes wonder, however, if there is an occasional real-word here or there (e.g., loanwords from another language?) but it's so easy for a large block of text (200 folios) to include a certain percentage of natural-language patterns by sheer coincidence, that I think this might be a chimera, an artifact of the text-generation process. I also sometimes wonder if there are a few phrases artfully hidden within filler, but if they are, they are dashedly difficult to tease out.
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