Have we ruled out simple substitution unwisely?

[Rafal]

I would say that everything said that most things from this thead has been already tried.

You can check the transcription of Prescott Currier. He several treats groups of signs as single entities like it was suggested here: 
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It increases the entropy but makes the words very short, many words will have only 2-3 symbols.
And it didn't help to solve the manuscript.

One thing that hasn't been thorughly tried are exotic languages (Jorge Stolfi hypothesis).
In the past people tried many languages with simple substitution and it didn't work. But there is much more languages that people haven't tried.
The simple substitution for them has actually never been ruled out. So if anyone wishes, he may try with Wolof, Geez, Samoyedic or Lao. But personally I won't be holding my breath 

One hint is a  just widely accepted as an 'a'. I never saw a ressourceful doubt on this being anything else than an 'a'.

See my old thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.