Repetition of words

[nablator]

The number for Japanese seems too high.  If I counted correctly, Japanese has only ~15 consonant sounds (including the voiced/unvoiced variants) and 5 vowel sounds plus three glides.  With consonant doubling and vowel lengthening, that would give less than 500 possible syllables.  Finding 643 in that small corpus seems surprising.   Did I miss something?  Maybe he counted the final 'n' as part of the previous syllable?

It's debatable:

... , there are at least several hundred possible syllables in Japanese, conservatively put at around 400. It’s easy to see how I reached the number 400. First, 100 of the mora in Japanese are allowed as syllable onsets, and these can easily be extended by the addition of a long vowel. So きゅ becomes きゅう, に becomes にい, etc. This alone brings us up to 200 possible syllables. Next, each of these 200 syllables can further be used to create another syllable by the addition of the mora ん. So きゅう would become きゅうん、にい would become にいん, etc. This doubles our list of possible syllables from 200 to 400. I cap my count here at 400, because it is debatable whether other sequences like わいん where the vowels in the middle are not identical constitutes one syllable or two (わ and いん).

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