Has anyone ever "deciphered" a paragraph?

[geoffreycaveney]

Why should one even bother to communicate anything anymore.
No matter what evidence one presents. It is always wrong anyway.
[...]
We don't even have to talk about criticism. It's always there, but never constructive.

Answer: Because one can learn something from it. 

Case in point: Certain recent critical comments by Marco, aimed at me (partly directly and partly indirectly), regardless of whether they were intended to be "constructive" or not, impelled me to go back and re-examine some of my very recent work on the Middle English hypothesis. I found some new ideas, re-focused my work on function words as Marco suggested, and as a result I believe I have improved the hypothesis, catching and discarding some previous mistakes, and finding some better and more promising lines of investigation. (This material is found in the recent posts in the "problematic...Germanic" thread, by the way.) Benjamin Franklin once said, "My enemies are really my friends, because they point out my weaknesses." Now I don't consider anyone on this forum to be my enemies, but let's use the phrase "sharp critics". It is not a pleasant experience to have one's mistakes caught and pointed out, but if one wants to accomplish something as difficult as deciphering the Voynich manuscript text, it is very likely going to be a necessary and unavoidable part of the process.

Geoffrey C.