I can't speak for Lisa but saying that "this seems to represent a naturally evolving human language" is not the same thing as saying there is no cypher. It is an argument against the text being a constructed language or being meaningless, not an argument against cyphers. It also may have its flaws, but that's a separate issue.
Let's assume for argument's sake that the text is meaningful, that there is a "natural" language. By which in this case I mean one that's not artificially constructed.
Something has been "done" to the text. The statistical properties that Mark mentioned show that the text has been processed, distorted, whatever you want to call it, in various ways that likely interact with each other and generate all the confusing statistics or noise that we see.
This processing or distortion of the text may be a cypher. It may be a cypher combined with other methods that have the effect of generating more concealment and confusion without that being the intention. It's also conceivable in theory at least that the processing is not a cypher but instead is the combined force of all these "innocent" methods. I feel that in such a case, the main thing distinguishing a cypher from such a system is the existence of an intent to conceal, and I get "concealment" vibes from various elements.
In brief, there is either a cypher or a mixture of operations that has virtually had the effect of a cypher. It cannot be an undistorted plaintext of a natural language, even a mysterious extinct one. That is why the statistics are important. Mark is giving you good advice to become familiar with them: not knowing of these statistics is a reason why so many people have dedicated so much of their time to wrong solutions. You don't need to be a professional statistician (I certainly am not) to appreciate the basics of Voynichese's weird behaviour.
(Also, unless this extinct language never had a script of its own, creating the Voynichese script instead of using its own script technically makes it a cypher anyway)
Let's assume for argument's sake that the text is meaningful, that there is a "natural" language. By which in this case I mean one that's not artificially constructed.
Something has been "done" to the text. The statistical properties that Mark mentioned show that the text has been processed, distorted, whatever you want to call it, in various ways that likely interact with each other and generate all the confusing statistics or noise that we see.
This processing or distortion of the text may be a cypher. It may be a cypher combined with other methods that have the effect of generating more concealment and confusion without that being the intention. It's also conceivable in theory at least that the processing is not a cypher but instead is the combined force of all these "innocent" methods. I feel that in such a case, the main thing distinguishing a cypher from such a system is the existence of an intent to conceal, and I get "concealment" vibes from various elements.
In brief, there is either a cypher or a mixture of operations that has virtually had the effect of a cypher. It cannot be an undistorted plaintext of a natural language, even a mysterious extinct one. That is why the statistics are important. Mark is giving you good advice to become familiar with them: not knowing of these statistics is a reason why so many people have dedicated so much of their time to wrong solutions. You don't need to be a professional statistician (I certainly am not) to appreciate the basics of Voynichese's weird behaviour.
(Also, unless this extinct language never had a script of its own, creating the Voynichese script instead of using its own script technically makes it a cypher anyway)
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