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.
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.)