The Textual Work of August Walla, mentally disabled artist

[Alin_J]

I have analysed a couple of different sections in the Voynich manuscript which had approximately the same number of tokens as Walla's first (invented words) text in this thread. I have actually analysed a much larger number of Voynich sections, but they all also showed quite similar statistics as these sections. Here is the result from the repeated n-tuple occurrences of these texts compared to Walla's first text and his German text, together with results from texts in natural languages from the Project Gutenberg website, all truncated to the first 1600 tokens. So, all of these texts are of comparable sizes measured in number of words (tokens). It allows a fairer comparison, both of repeated sequences, but mostly of type-token ratio (TTR). First shown is a new graph over % of repeated n-tuples. Furthest to the left are Walla's two texts, then follows four different sections of the Voynich manuscript, and then the truncated text sections in six different languages. The TTR can be seen in the next figure (table).

   
   

Now the Voynich sections look more similar to the excerpts of the natural language texts, while Walla's invented text looks like the odd one out, judging from the much higher incidents of repeated 3- to 6-tuples compared to repeated pairs. However all of the texts TTRs are quite similar. The English text is quite repetitive, but I think the differences here among languages only reflects differences in writing style or style of texts, as seen from earlier data. I think these results in other ways also in this regard points towards natural language-hypothesis for the Voynich manuscript, if one allows for the possibility that different sections of the manuscript is written in very different language styles/subjects matters/dialects, or by different authors or whatever, that makes them share lesser number of repeated phrases than is common in larger coherent texts.