alternating patterns

[Anton]

Hi doranchack,

I was talking about function words specifically, so many of your examples would be irrelevant in that context. Also, one should consider that we are looking not simply for a repetition, but for a more or less frequent repetition, for a repetition that would occur twenty times in the text (btw, I partly checked and Takahashi transcription introduces some wrong repetitions, e.g. in one place it claims daiin daiin when it is actually daiio daiin, but anyway, daiin daiin is not something which occurs only once or twice). In this view, I like your example of "for for", that's a construction which would be natural in a treatise of the kind.

Also, I think that in German there is the construct "das dass", and if I remember correctly, I have seen it used in old manuscripts as "das das".

So, in short, yes: sequential repetition of function words is possible, and it does not even have to be something artificial.

Regarding Marco's suggestion that daiin is a candidate for "and" - I disagree. According to Job's tool, there are eleven folios ending with daiin, and I can't imagine a functional block of text ending with "and", unless the language has some weird positional rule for placing "and" after the words that it connects.

There is a simple test for function-word-suspects. We just need to check if they occur as labels. If they do, that would mean they are unlikely to be function words. If they don't, then this would reinforce their position as function-word-candidates.

One additional idea is that repetitive vords may be function words (thus fitting for a pattern like XYXY), but, at the same time, their sequential repetitions comprise one word instead of two. For example, in Latin dictionary, we have that sort of things under the letter Q: "quo" is a word, but "quoquo" is as well. Same thing for "quis" and "quisquis", "quid" and "quidquid".

Last but not least, one should mind the possibility of shuffling. Indeed, there are indications that the text might have been put down in several passes, which, among other things, suggests shuffling. In that case, all discussions of vord repetitions are pointless The fact that there are three-vord repetitions there, and even one four-vord repetition, slightly moves the balance onto the side of shuffling. Although in the thread above quoted I imagined some examples that illustrate potential cases of such repetitions.