Why we can't read it and Michael Coe's "Five Pillars of Decipherment"

[kckluge]

What if the Voynich Manuscript is a natural language but a constructed alphabet? Would that fall under Pillar #2 of the "Five Pillars of Decipherment"?
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I'm only being slightly facetious when I respond by saying that at the end of the day all scripts are "constructed scripts" (or adaptations of already existing scripts) -- some are just constructed over a longer period of time. With the caveat that I'm not a linguist (nor do I play one on TV), from the reading I've done on historic decipherments I'm not sure from a process point of view why that would change things. Read Coe's Breaking the Maya Code and look at all the complications the people working on that script had to deal with -- multiple forms of the same glyph, multiple glyphs representing the same syllable -- the Cherokee syllabary would be a walk in the park compared to that. Now, if it was a constructed script by a non-native speaker that might complicate things because they might do a poor job of capturing aspects of the spoken language (e.g., see the history of romanization of the Chinese language).

Karl