The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Just being curious: and how does your theroy explan the qokeedy qokeedy repetitions or the fact that just a bunch of "words" are most repeated throughout the MS (daiin, chol, etc)? Does Chinese behave like this?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a text in Chinese (Mandarin pinyin) with no punctuation or hyphens, each parag formatted as a single line, with blanks before and after each word, and a line "=" between parags.  It has ~59500 words. I count 248 non-overlapping occurrences of "  X X " where X is a single word.  

It is  derived from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which has the original text with punctuation and the Chinese characters in braces (unfortunately not in Unicode but in an older two-byte-per-character encoding). 

I don't remember how common repeated words are in the VMS.  Anyway, repeats may be even more common in other monosyllabic languages.  Also this text is transcripts from the Voice of America broadcasts; if the writers were native English speakers, they may have avoided repeats, since they are considered defects in English.

And also statistics like this one depend a lot on the text, maybe more than the language.  A herbal (say) may make frequent use of a term or syntax that happens to be a duplicated word.  Like English "fifty-fifty" or "had had". (The last one occurs 4 times in War of the Worlds).  Or Italian "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."...

All the best, --stolfi