06-03-2019, 03:59 PM
I think the answers to these questions depend upon how you define "words". When the linguistic analyst stated that "the syllables are not organized into words", that simply means that there are no clear distinct units larger than the syllables. But that does not mean that one cannot consider and analyze arbitrary strings of two or more syllables in glossolalic speech.
For example, if a glossolalia speaker uttered the syllables "...arlamaynunabalinabalinabalikamarila..." in the course of their speech, linguistic analysis might not be able to determine any particular organization of this speech into definable words. But we can still identify the consecutive repetition of syllables "...nabalinabalinabali..." within the speech. We don't have to call "nabali" a "word", we could call it a vord, or just a sequence of three syllables. But whatever we call it, it is repeated three consecutive times in this speech. (To be clear, I just invented this example.)
My instinct is that glossolalia is far more likely to be more repetitive than natural language. We would have to look up the details in the Samarin book to confirm or refute this.
If a person wrote in glossolalia, they would most probably try to indicate some kind of word breaks in their writing, because glossolalia speakers believe that they are speaking an actual language.
Regarding Zipf's law, we need to consider studies such as Wentian Li (1992) "Random Texts Exhibit Zipf's-Law-Like Word Frequency Distribution" (reference 11 in the Wikipedia article on "Zipf's law"). Quoting the article, "in a document in which each character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all letters (plus a space character), the 'words' follow the general trend of Zipf's law."
Thus, while it may be useful in some linguistic analysis of a known natural language text to consider the likelihood of the Zipfian distribution of the words in it, the converse may in fact not be true: The mere existence of a Zipf's law distribution of the words in a text of unknown character may actually not necessarily be indicative of an underlying natural language in the text.
For example, if a glossolalia speaker uttered the syllables "...arlamaynunabalinabalinabalikamarila..." in the course of their speech, linguistic analysis might not be able to determine any particular organization of this speech into definable words. But we can still identify the consecutive repetition of syllables "...nabalinabalinabali..." within the speech. We don't have to call "nabali" a "word", we could call it a vord, or just a sequence of three syllables. But whatever we call it, it is repeated three consecutive times in this speech. (To be clear, I just invented this example.)
My instinct is that glossolalia is far more likely to be more repetitive than natural language. We would have to look up the details in the Samarin book to confirm or refute this.
If a person wrote in glossolalia, they would most probably try to indicate some kind of word breaks in their writing, because glossolalia speakers believe that they are speaking an actual language.
Regarding Zipf's law, we need to consider studies such as Wentian Li (1992) "Random Texts Exhibit Zipf's-Law-Like Word Frequency Distribution" (reference 11 in the Wikipedia article on "Zipf's law"). Quoting the article, "in a document in which each character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all letters (plus a space character), the 'words' follow the general trend of Zipf's law."
Thus, while it may be useful in some linguistic analysis of a known natural language text to consider the likelihood of the Zipfian distribution of the words in it, the converse may in fact not be true: The mere existence of a Zipf's law distribution of the words in a text of unknown character may actually not necessarily be indicative of an underlying natural language in the text.