Thank you, Ben! Your observations about repetition in Walla's work are quite interesting. I think that, when the phenomenon is as frequent as in Walla, it likely has multiple causes, as you suggest. Quasi-reduplication in the VMS is fascinating. I believe that several cases are the result of a perfect reduplication that was altered by the kind of transformations that Emma discussed in her You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view., e.g. line initial reduplication X.X can become yX.X because the first token in a line is subject to specific transformations.
After Jonas pointed out reduplication in the Finnish text Kalevala, I discussed quasi-reduplication in the poem with a Finnish native speaker (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). She (?) explained that consecutive sequences like "huitukoille haitukoille" or "soutelevat joutelevat" are the result of a process in which words are altered for expressive reasons.
Vilmiira Wrote:Finnish allows for making new words like this, especially for more descriptive words, like sounds (kilinä, kolina, kalina) , ways of walking (lompsia, lampsia, kampsia), a kind of person (köppänä, käppänä) etc. ... new words can be created pretty freely
In the end, this Kalevala Quasi-Reduplication is quite similar to your point (1): it has the function of stressing the meaning of a word.
As a further exploration of points (2) and (3), I would love to understand more of how glossolalia works. I have read somewhere that words are often reduplicated in that phenomenon, but I have been unable to find a written corpus for computing actual statistics. Overall, I see point (1) as mostly semantic, while points (2) and (3) are more suggestive of meaninglessness.
In the attached diagram, I plot the % of consecutive words in which the first (X axis) or last (Y axis) characters are the same.
For instance, in this sequence the first two words contribute to the X axis measure and the last two words to the Y axis measure:
okchoy
otchol chocth
y osch
y
Red circles are texts by Walla. Blue squares are Voynichese. Purple squares are from Brian Cham's collection of texts in various languages.
It seems that Walla's texts are somehow intermediate between Voynichese and other texts. In addition to the various EVA files, I added the Voynich v101 transliteration, which uses many more symbols: as expected, this reduces the number of prefix/suffix repetitions, but not enough to make the VMS look "normal".
I think it's interesting that the Kalevala (N-FIN) is about as extreme as the VMS in this respect: in both sources, about half of the consecutive words share at least the same initial or final character. The main difference is that the Kalevala favours identical consecutive prefixes, while the VMS favours identical consecutive suffixes. A few lines from the Finnish poem:
selvi
ä sin
ä ikän
ä
ilma
n luie
n lonsumatta,
leukojen
leveämättä,
hammasten
hajoamatta,
kielen
keikkelehtämättä.
This kind of alliteration is likely linked to what you say in point (3) about chants and incantations: it has the function of making words easier to memorize. Also, it conforms to some form of aesthetics. I feel quite sure that some kind of arbitrary aesthetics like this is at play in the VMS (as it is in Walla). The question is if there also is some meaningful grammar mixed with these patterns of if it is all just playing with sounds, or with glyphs as Timm and Schinner believe).