Has anyone ever "deciphered" a paragraph?

[tavie]

I'm pretty sure if someone could "decrypt" (I'm using the term loosely) a full paragraph, that it would generalize in one way or another (conceptually if not specifically) to the rest of the manuscript

That's my point - it's far too easy to link one paragraph alone to the concepts in the manuscript, and so it wouldn't be sufficient.  We've seen lines or even paragraphs before that could be related conceptually to the manuscript, but not enough to prove it isn't the result of coincidence or selective interpretation, conscious or unconscious.  Multiple pages would make it harder to conclude either of those. 

Anyway, my overall belief is that by the time a paragraph has been fully decrypted (in the sense of the genuine solution), the solver will have multiple paragraphs almost at that stage too because of the work required across the whole manuscript to unravel a complex system and all its rules (and will need to complete them to confirm the rules).   And if they don't, then that's a sign that either there's something wrong with their theory ... or somehow everyone has missed the signs of an incredibly simple system for decades, despite people attempting to plug in every known live and dead language under the sun.  And despite the obvious complexities in Voynichese...

If the solution were simple, a straightforward one-way cipher, then it probably would be more of a linear progression:  a foothold would be a breakthrough, translating one paragraph, with character identifications proceeding like dominos.  That one paragraph might be sufficient to establish the majority of the characters. 

But if the solution were complex, then the foothold is not a breakthrough.  There are going to be contradictions to your identifications, you get nonsense when you plug in the letters and find yourself straining to explain it away, and the rules will not be discernible from that one paragraph or indeed easily discernible at all.    And so you need a lot more material in order to try to work out what the rules are.  Likely from other quires and scribes.  So that's why I would expect that by the time (if!) a person has ever got a genuine solution for a full paragraph, they will have many others at a near state and would want to complete them in any case to confirm the extremely complex rules of the system.