Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective

[Koen G]

If you gave me someone's historical attempt at writing Catalan in a modified alphabet, I could tell you pretty quickly that we're looking at a member of the Romance language family, then take it from there.

Yeah, but Albanian? Or even Armenian?

That's not my point - I use Romance languages as an example because I have experience with them. And we have other people in the world experienced with other language families. So say we have in front of us a medieval attempt to build an alphabet for a language. My suspicion is that a person well-acquainted with the relevant culture could still recognize the context in which this alphabet emerged. At the same time, they'd probably already know the language or language family. And only then, specific dialects may become relevant.

For any larger text written in and around Europe between let's say 1200-1500, I think this preliminary identification would take place in a matter of hours, not a century (and counting) like in the case of the VM. Of course, after that, scholars could spend an eternity studying the text. But we would know very quickly the broad strokes of what we're dealing with. Not so for the VM.