Repetition of words

[Jorge_Stolfi]

A question that I am keen to answer is on average how many examples of repeated words should there be in a typical Latin manuscript of the period. I am inclined to assume that the answer is very few.

I am trying to check that on my Latin samples.  Unless I goofed, there are no consecutive repetitions in the Alchemical Herbal that Marco transcribed.  

I got a dozen or so in other samples, like 

  ... vocatur ab aristotele policernia policernia autem secundum quosdam ...

in Ockam's "Dialogus"; but they all seem to be across punctuation.  The full text of the above is 

  ... Principans autem in civitate aliquando vocatur ab Aristotele policernia. Policernia autem secundum quosdam tres habet significationes ...

Should these count?  The VMS does not seem to have any punctuation, which I gather was still not uncommon in manuscripts from the 1400s.  But Marco's herbal has no consecutive repeats even after removing the punctuation...

On the other hand, consecutive repeats are quite common in my Chinese samples.  From the Mandarin novel Dream of the Red Chamber:

    44 0.12536 lao3.1
    32 0.09117 tai4
    21 0.05983 mei4
    17 0.04843 nai3
    14 0.03989 lao3
    12 0.03419 mu3.1
    12 0.03419 yi1
    11 0.03134 jie3
    ...

Here the first line means that the character with third-tone pinyin "lǎo", homophone 1 -- which may be  老 = "old", not sure yet -- occurs 44 times in consecutive positions, as  老老 = "old man".  That is 12.5% of all consecutive word repeats.  But again, these counts may or may not ignore punctuation -- I must check my messy scripts.

In my Vietnamese Pentateuch sample the word "đời" = "life" occurs 3 times as "đời đời"= "eternal".  Same caveat about punctuation applies.  However, since this sample is a translation from English, probably by Western missionaries, word doubling may have been unconsciously avoided because it is very bad by English literary standards.  I must get hold of a text written by a native...

From my Tibetan sample -- A Play of Mistaken Illusion, being some Frank Notes on the Nature of His Life written by a Certain Person Laboring under the Delusion that He Belongs to the String of Reincarnations of Jangchub Chupel [= Byang Chub Chos 'Phel], a Holder of the Throne of Je Tsongkapa by Skyabs Rje Khri Byang Rin Po Che [= Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche] (1901--1981), the junior tutor to the 14th Dalai Lama, as I am sure you really wanted to know, I get

    10 0.18519 KHANG
      7 0.12963 YANG
      6 0.11111 MDZES
      3 0.05556 CHUNG
      3 0.05556 DE
      2 0.03704 GNANG

So "KHANG KHANG" occurs 10 times in that sample.  Internet tools say that KHANG is ཁང = "house", and "KHANG KHANG" is ཁང་ཁང= "houses", "abodes", "accomodation", etc.  But I wouldn't put my mouse on the fire about that.

All the best, --jorge