I shall continue to take the approach that the words are not words,
and that 'qokeey' is some kind of fingerprint of a concrete word.
FWIW, my belief is that - for the most part - a word start frequently
indicates either a change in encoding mechanism, or an actual word start in
the plaintext, or just obfuscation (though I think the first two probably
dominate the third).
So: EVA "ot-" could well be using one code mechanism, "qo-" another, etc.
Given that I also believe that we're looking at a verbose cipher (with many
plaintext letters encoded as ciphertext pairs), this would also have the
effect of reducing the average length of a ciphertext word, which would be
desirable on the part of the encoder - nothing would betray a verbose
cipher quicker than double-length words. :-)
Also: it may well be that this general tactic would have the effect of
producing the curious word-length distribution as frequently observed. That
distribution provides a fairly strong counter-argument to the "words are
words" view alone.
Also: I think that the existence of doubled words of different lengths may
also form a good counterargument to the hypothesis that the VMS is encoded
using some kind of polyalphabetic cipher with a fixed length cycle.