How hard was the text to decipher? Not very. Scholars managed to track down a scant few last surviving readers of the script and were able to decipher texts with their help.
How similar is it to known Chinese scripts? Most Nushu characters are modified from standard Chinese script, sometimes just by tilting a Chinese character. However, Nushu, unlike Chinese characters, is generally speaking a syllabary. Each of these Chinese characters was chosen for its sound (in the local dialect) and then reused in all places that sound was used, regardless of the original meaning of the Chinese character. There are some "homegrown" logograms as well.
However, it is completely unreadable to a Chinese speaker. Certainly I can't read it at all. All that sticks out is the occasional slanted standard Chinese character, which because it's a syllabary, I have no idea whether it corresponds to the meaning of the Chinese character in ordinary Chinese.
> How hard was the text to decipher? Not very. Scholars managed to track down a scant few last surviving readers of the script and were able to decipher texts with their help.
Without their help they would have had to decipher it. With their help they did not need to decipher it because it was read to them. If you can read it, it isn't deciphering. (Just a point of terminology here for all the cryptographers reading this ;-)).
If the speakers read the texts to you, you aren’t deciphering them, but what if you have 100 texts, and they read ten to you, then you work out that it is phonetic and compile what you think is an alphabet you use to read the rest?
Only from time to time you stumble, so you ask them to read passages that don’t fit your hypothetical alphabet. And you use that to refine your understanding?
Some of that activity would be deciphering, wouldn’t it? Could we consider the surviving readers to have the task of suppling you with cleartext to go with the ciphertext?
(Not trying to start a formal argument, just feeling around for the edge of the definition of “deciphering” by way of a hypothetical.)
Yes, that would be deciphering in a sense... in a sense to use "decipher" for "translate" is already an analogy, since "cipher" means to calculate or to write in a code, and "decipher" means to reverse the code... which is not exactly what's happening here if the language was not enciphered but merely obscure, but it's a natural enough extension of the meaning of the word.
