On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[Sam G]

I am often a bit confused when people argue about whether the VM text is a cipher or not. It is not at all clear what is meant with a cipher, and where the line is drawn.
I made this thread in the hopes that especially those "old timers" who have been involved with the text might clarify a few things for me.

When someone says "it is not a cipher", I guess they mean that no uniform system was used to purposefully transform an understandable text into something that needs to be "deciphered" by the reader - right?

Basically.  Use the term "procedure" instead of "cipher" if that helps.  Voynichese could not have been produced by applying some kind of procedure to a text in Latin or other European language.  It's not really a matter of whether you call such a nonexistent procedure a "cipher" or not.

The only real exception to this would be a "procedure" equivalent to translating a text from one language into another, i.e. one that involved at least word-for-word, and more likely concept-for-concept, substitution.  And then the resulting text could be understood by someone who understood the language it had been translated into, without needing to "decrypt" (translate) back to the original language.

Let's consider this hypothetical scenario. This is not something I (or anyone?) believe, it is just a thought experiment:

A relatively small community lives somewhere in central-southern Europe. Their language or dialect is different than that of those around them. This was not uncommon in the times before standardization and the eradication of "les patois". Their language is entirely unknown to us, and it was likely an isolate like Basque. Somewhere around the 13th century, they adopted the Latin script for writing in their own language, though over the centuries they made numerous alterations to express different sounds. The result was Voynichese. Since they were a small community, they only produced a small amount of manuscripts, and their language and script were wiped from the face of the earth when the renaissance desire for national unity started imposing standard language forms within national borders. Only one manuscript remains today, and nobody knows how to read it.

So my question is: only looking at the origin of the script, is such a scenario possible? Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this?

Basically, no, there's no real problem with it.