yes, i looked at the Zotlabs/Lib/Messagefilter.php and a comment does say



     // Language matching is a bit tricky, because the language can be ambiguous (detect_language() returns '').
    // If the language is ambiguous, the message will pass (be accepted) regardless of language rules.


and minimum length is defined as define('LANGUAGE_DETECT_MIN_LENGTH', 128);

so it looks like messages shorter than that escape language filter.