RE: VMs: Excessive frequency of doubles

["Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Hi, I'm new to the VM.  My background is linguistics and computer science.)

I'd like to add that doubles and triples could be expected in certain kinds
of texts.  For example, a couple years ago I picked up an encoded handbook
of Masonic rituals, and one of the things that kept throwing me was a symbol
that would occur once, twice or three times in a row.  I eventually decided
it must mean "knock", and I think the particular number of knocks in each
situation was meaningful.  I don't have the text right here with me so I
can't give a real sample sentence, but there were lines that would read
something like "he calls the meeting to order, knock knock knock."

Ritual texts in general probably have similar features of limited vocabulary
and repetition, though one would expect the same phrases to be repeated over
and over again.  Does anyone know, off-hand, how long the longest repeated
string of words in the text is?



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