On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[Anton]

Most importantly, it has been suggested (Bax, Emma?) that Voynichese script was a project that didn't really take off well. It seems very possible to me that they first tried to get a feel for the script on a scientific text they had handy, rather than go for a bible right away. In this sense, the VM script would be the preparation for a language's own script, rather than a fully blossoming one.

Yes, I also thought about that option - kinda unfortunate fellow of Glagolitic. That does not look plausible to me. What does it mean to get a feel of the script? It means trying writing in it and then reading it and comrehending the contents, this being tested on a set of people. A commonplace document would be used for that purpose - such as would be familiar to and understood by others, not some specific knowledge others probably would not understand even in their native tongue.

What's also worth noting is that any scientific discourse in a language incapable of writing is hardly possible. Let's say a language has no alphabet, but I think what naturally follows out of that is that the respective people would have no "science". Unless, of course, the educated folks thereof are educated in some other language (like e.g. ancient Abkhazians were educated in Greek) - then they will be able to convey scientific discourse in Greek. But they will fail to translate this discourse in writing immediately after inventing the script for their native tongue - just because it is devoid of appropriate vocabulary. Decades and maybe centuries would be needed for that - during which period of time writings in the native tongue would develop, in turn stimulating development of local education and philosophy/science (not without extensive borrowing from more developed cultures, of course). For an example, if I'm not mistaken, the first herbal in Cyrillic is dated to XVI (!) century - although, of course, it was mainly the devastating invasion of Mongols what substantially delayed cultural progress in the Eastern Europe.

As Sam brought up in our discussion, certain areas throughout history have seen all books destroyed during tumultuous times.

Putting forward such argument is equal to saying that the supposed culture was swept out in its entirety - because writing is of course not limited to books. We are not speaking of destroying an area, we are effectively speaking about destroying a culture here. This may be convincing for something as old as a couple millenia BC (say, the Maykop stone), but, I'm afraid, not for XV century AD. That only one material artefact of a culture once  intervened by European missionaries (those who carried Latin shorthand there) survives, and this with no trace in any European written source - I'd say for post-Gutenberg Europe that's impossible.

Much, much more probable is that the VMS is product of an individual design, not an artefact of an extinct culture.

Here's the thing: it doesn't really matter whether the Voynich script was invented completely new or adapted from an existing script. Plenty of people with the appropriate knowledge have looked at the script and nobody has identified it. That means it cannot be read using outside knowledge.

Well, it can be approached by adding hypotheses and testing them, that's what people are doing. That's just another avenue of solving the task, as opposed to trying to understand the script on its own. Actually, I have no problems with that, I don't want to say to anyone "don't do this or don't do that", I just put forth some reasoning of that some class of hypotheses doesn't look plausible from the beginning, so it might be in vain to bother testing individual hypotheses on their own.

As a sidenote, there is another interesting question here. Suppose we agree that the script is derived from the Latin shorthand (or what's the appropriate word). Then how it turned out that educated people of XVII century who beyond doubt were better familiar with the contemporary writing practice than we are - how would they even assume that this may be something coptic?! Yes, they did not have carbon dating (neither other techniques of dating), but would not the common shapes manifest themselves to them immediately?