Re: Madness Again

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> 
> As I mentioned in my posts a week or so ago on agraphia, there
> are also many language problems resulting from strokes, senility
> or brain injury that can cause very peculiar effects in spoken
> or written language.  It's too bad we can't assume the
> illustrations and the handwriting are the result of the original
> author, otherwise we could examine them for evidence.  Still,
> the shape of the letters might give some clues, particularly the
> gallows (as a set) to inclue the really odd-ball ones.  Those
> might be worth showing to a psychologist and/or a Speech
> pathologist, the curls and such might be indicative of
> schiziphrenia or brain injury, especially some of the odd
> gallows where it looks like the writer got lost or carried away
> in the act of making the curls.

	I looked in *Linguistics for Non-Linguists* by Frank
Parker.  He has a chapter on neurolinguistics.  The closest 
thing to what we want is Wernicke's aphasia, caused by damage 
to the first temporal convolution of the dominant 
hemisphere (usually the left), close to the primary 
auditory cortex.  Basically this symdrome primarily
affects language comprehension.  However, there are 
surprising influence on the sufferer's language 
expression, due at least part to the fact that 
the sufferer cannot monitor his output.  Speech is
fluent but full of neologisms.  

	There are neologisms such as bliver, glover, 
devable, bowling birt or showling birt (bowling shirt).

Q: What is your speech problem?
A: Because no one gotta scotta gowan thwa, thirst, gell,
gerst, derund, gystrol, that's all.

	I took Dr. Parker's Intro to Linguistics; he said 
that Wernicke's aphasia is very serious and would be confined
to an institution.  Thus I doubt that this has anything to 
do with the VMs.

	The repetitions are reminiscent of schizophrenics's
language but schizophrenics AFAIK do not produce neologims.  

	For a sample of schizophrenic speech:

Rants by Francis Dec
http://www.teleport.com/~dkossy/dec.html

	James Hampton is a possible case of someone with a
psychiatric problem creating a new alphabet or cipher.  
(Although I don't know whether Hampton was in fact a 
psych case.)

http://160.111.100.112/webpac-bin/wgbroker?070600243409608267+1+scan+select+2+0

I got the Smithsonian's microfilm that shows Hampton's notebook and
copied it.
He has an alphabet, but I've never before seen one like it.  One unit is
like |||| 
and another one is OOO and yet another is RR (like a script R but
embellished.  
I haven't done much more with it.  

Dennis