Has anyone ever "deciphered" a paragraph?

[geoffreycaveney]

Anyway, it is important to acknowledge that ancient manuscripts did not encode word salads, but languages with well defined properties.
For instance, one can consider the English You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a 1410 ca copy of The Canterbury Tales). An excellent transcription is available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

One can compare the most frequent 20 words in the manuscript with the 20 most frequent words in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 15 of the 20 most frequent manuscript words appear in the top 20 modern words, either identically (green) or with minimal variations (upper-case initial, or þ for 'th').

Though my knowledge of English is limited, I find this manuscript very accessible. Of course, getting used to the script requires a little initial effort, but then things work quite well. E.g.

Whan that aprille witħ his schowres swoote
The drougħt of Marche haþ perced to þe roote
And bathud euery veyne in swich licour
Of which vertue engendred is þe flour
Whan zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Enspirud hatħ in euery holte and heetħ
The tendre croppes and þe ȝonge sonne
Hath in þe Ram his halfe cours I ronne

The end of the last line you quote is "ironne" or "yronne", rather than "I ronne". The (one) word is the past participle of the verb "irennen", which means "to run" or, of celestial bodies, "to move through the sky". This then makes sense of the whole clause, which actually begins in the middle of the previous line: the subject is "the yonge sonne" and the verb phrase is "Hath...ironne". The object, "his halfe cours", is placed in between the two words of the verb phrase, after the prepositional phrase "in the Ram". In modern English the syntax and word order would rather be "The young sun has run his half-course in the Ram." Middle English, especially poetic Middle English, had rather more flexible word order than we now have in modern English. 

Your list of the 20 most frequent words in the Harley MS 7334 includes "I" as 6th on the list, but if it includes such tokens as this "I", which is actually just the first letter of the word "ironne", I imagine that the list may be misleading. After all, if the transcription makes a basic parsing mistake in the 8th line of one of the most famous passages in all of English literature, it does not inspire confidence in the statistical accuracy of the rest of the transcription and a word frequency analysis based on it.

Geoffrey

The fact that 'þe' is equivalent to 'the' is quite obvious, since the word is so frequent. Once you understand this, it's easy to see that (like in modern English) the article appears at the start of noun phrases and is typically followed by either a noun or an adjective (þe roote, þe flour, þe ȝonge sonne, þe Ram). Like in modern English, 'his' behaves similarly to 'the' (his schowres swoote, his swete breeth, his halfe cours). Like in modern English, 'and' connects two grammatical structures of the same kind (e.g. sentences or noun phrases). You can basically start from function words, which are almost identical to modern English, and work from there.
I can have trouble with the meaning of words like 'schowres',  'holte' or 'heetħ', but identifying part-of-speech categories is almost always straightforward, so it's easy to keep track of grammar, even when some of the meaning is lost.
The true Voynich translation will allow us to do just that: start from function words, identify basic grammatical structures and finally get to word meanings and translation.

The fantasy that language structure is a modern invention cannot possibly lead to anything interesting.