When people suggest that the repetitions in the Voynich Manuscript might have arisen because of a delusional paranoid author, I do wonder if they have ever seen anything by angry, mad, disbarred lawyer Francis E. Dec Esquire? Here’s one of his staggering puppet communist Frankenstein computer gangster god rant letters performed by a voice actor courtesy of YouTube. Well worth watching right to the end, I’d say! 🙂
Really, could anyone square this kind of content with the calm, controlled, rational penmanship of the VMs? I don’t think so, sorry!
He lives as people do in a war-zone, it seems to me. I feel for him as one does for people traumatised by witnessing any major disaster.
The Wikipedia article mentions association with the Voynich, agreeing with your conclusion:
“There is … a 1998 mathematical analysis which uses five Dec rants as a gauge of “schizophrenic language” for an entropic evaluation of the undeciphered Voynich Manuscript[47] (concluding that schizophrenia alone could not account for the manuscript’s puzzling nature).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_E._Dec
His writing has cult status in America, but I certainly hadn’t heard of him before.
Hi Diane! I’m the one who did the 1998 analysis. My analysis showed more randomness in Dec’s rants than in normal speech, while you see much less randomness than in normal speech in Voynichese, at least on a character level.
I’ve seen other schizophrenic rants and read psychiatrists’ discussions, and Dec’s was not uncommon. I certainly feel for him; he could have been treated with the medications available today.