The Textual Work of August Walla, mentally disabled artist

[Ben Trovato]

It took longer than I expected (due to limited access to libraries), but now I have finished the compilation of text samples from August Walla's works. It's about 15.000 characters extracted from paintings, drawings, and documents, where he uses "foreign" or "encrypted" language. I did not include "plain german" text, of which there would be a lot more...

Alas, it was not possible to arrange the texts in chronological order, as in most cases, the date of origin is not passed down. But there are two exceptions: the works taken from "Feilacher Bd. [=vol.] 3" and "Feilacher Bd. 4" should be strictly chronological within the respective volumes.

I have labeled two groups of texts separately: those where Walla himself claims to write in Latin (="CL", Corpus Latinum) or in Russian (="CC", Corpus Cyrillicum). Each of them is roughly one third of the texts, but I have no idea whether this is sufficient for separate analysis. I think that especially the "Russian" texts might be interesting, because Wallla was forced to deal with cyrillic letters from his dictionary which he had no knowledge of, so he replaced those letters by "similar" latin ones. There are also texts which include "translations" or word lists in the style of a dictionary. The labels, and the source for the texts are found in squared brackets preceding each text. Within the text, "[@]" indicates that the text is interrupted by the drawing here. Line breaks, capitalization and all other special characters are kept to the original appearance.

... feel free to use this for your research, but then I'd ask you to feel obliged to share your findings!