The Textual Work of August Walla, mentally disabled artist

[Ben Trovato]

One theory I've heard expressed by several Voynich researchers is that the VMS was the product of an educated person from a wealthy family, who descended into mental illness.

 
Yes, you run into this opinion - and related theories, such as glossolalia - quite frequently. But it always comes with a tone like, "...but there is no way of knowing". That's exactly what I would like to scrutinize. 

In the examples I provided, I think one can see possible relations. #6 surely is as close to Voynichese as #8 is to Latin. 
More seriously, in the text samples #6-8 you can see some of Wallas techniques of repetition, permutation and combination of "words" that (to me) bear resemblance to the movements in the VMS. You also see the persistence of "words" over an extended period of time (cf. SARARILL(H), who of course is one of the more prominent private deities of Walla, or SAAAHNH(X), which seems to be some kind of incantation).

It would be interesting to try statistically analyzing large samples of writing (or transcribed speech) of patients with various sorts of mental illnesses, to see if the statistics were closer to what we see in the VMS than most written language.

It is actually the goal of this thread to find out if there is interest for a project like this. Personally, I could imagine this would more fruitful than doing the n-th iteration of a test on Pliny, Dante or Moby Dick. And AFAIK, there has been surprsingly little research done into this direction (also regarding the drawings, but that would be an entirely different subject).

I'm particularly interested in the writing of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. patients.

I don't recall I have seen works of an artist diagnosed with hypergraphia. I'm pretty sure that there is none among the Gugging artists. Walla, on the other hand, was quite manic in producing his works, not only confining himself to paper and canvases, but painting/writing on household articles, rooms, walls, houses, streets ... (which frequently got him into trouble). So there would be enough text for analysis.