agraphia

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

Again, I apologize for being an 'armchair warrior' with everyone
here so much more talented than I, but I think about the VMS
quite a bit and something occurred to me.  This is not a very
exciting prospect and I hope it's not true because it would not
be nearly as interesting as hoped, but I think it's worth
considering if it hasn't been already.
Respectfully,
Brian Farnell

With the talk of 'glossalia' I thought of some things I am
currently studying in my Speech Language Pathology classes. 
There is a diverse group of language disorders known as
'Aphasia'.  Characteristic to some is a symptom know as
'agraphia'.  Agraphia is difficulty in writing.  The writing may
be full of mistakes or malformed or may just be a problem
writing what the client wishes to write.  Agraphia may include
written variations of 'aggramatism', 'jargon' and 'neoligisms'. 
Agrammatism is just lack of grammar, not important here.  Jargon
is similar to children who will 'talk' using syllables
appropriate to the language they are learning with adult like
intonation and prosody, sounding like the target language but
having no meaning whatsoever.  This could mathematically seem
very similar to the target language, I assume, especially in an
adult whose language had developed fully before the onset of the
condition.  Neologism is just the production of a new word and
the use of it as a common word.  Aphasia is usually the result
of a stroke.  The same agraphia problems might be presented by
other causes to include senility and brain injury.  Has any
Speech Pathologist looked at these results?  I know it's a long
shot, it really is, but it might be worth getting an opinion. 
Basically, there are three things that make this plausible:

1)  IN MY OPINION, the resultant writing might mathematically
share very many characteristics with a real language

2)  It is very possible that a writer in this condition might
not monitor himself and so write volumes without ever realizing
it to be gibberish

3)  The writer might be otherwise fully functional, even
brilliant, people talking to him might have the greatest respect
for his intellectual capacity and be eager for a book by him,
even in an unknown 'code'

Things I would check if I could show the document and the math
to a Speech Language Pathologist:

1)  What is indicated by the spacing of the words around the
pictures?

2)  Could agraphic jargon mathematically resemble a real
language?  Where would it be similar, where would it deviate?

3)  Could the two different 'hands' and the difference in letter
frequency  in Voynich A and Voynich B be the result of the same
person on different days?  Some brain injuries result in changes
of personality sometimes permanent, sometimes fluctuating.

4)  Could the gallows characters represent some remnant in the
writer's mind of capitalization or illustrated letters?

Another question to ask yourselves and the SPL has to do with
what is NOT present in the VMS.  This I am not expert on the VMS
enough to know.  An example would be if you would expect the
presence of illustrated letters where there were none.  In some
of the primitive cryptography and analyses I did with the Navy,
often it was the lack of something expected rather than the
inclusion of something specific that gave clues.
Thank you very much for your attention,

Brian