So it's like the vi of languages? I.e. memorize the relatively few meanings of the "words" and then customize/combine them to the context. Seems like with languages there would be a lot more room for ambiguities though.
No. vi has a grammar, like all natural languages, including this one I guess. vi's is simple, mostly combining a noun with a verb, plus some simple modifiers. It sounds like the interesting thing about this language isn't that it has a grammar, it's that it has so few (and well chosen?) words that virtually every noun and every verb must be expressed by combining these building-block words. vi doesn't seem like that to me.
Possibly a strained analogy - but for a very simple system that is Turing-complete there is always Combinatory Logic which only needs two very simple functions (S & K):