Sequential word repetitions in the VMS

[Anton]

maybe the VM does not have dedicated single symbols for numerals. Do you think in that case their only option would be to write out "twenty two" in full instead of some verbose way of writing numerals

That's more a question for specialists in, so to speak, languages with undeveloped scripts. I don't know if there are examples of languages that lack dedicated symbols for numerals in writing. Historically letters were used for numerals for a long time. This is true for Latin or e.g for Cyrillic stuff like Russian. And I think for Greek and Hebrew as well. That was basically the language's response to the challenge of not having dedicated symbols for digits. But even supposing one does not have dedicated symbols, he would not express it in this strange positional way. He would put it in writing just as he is used to it orally. If he says "twenty two", he would write "twenty two", not "two two".

Furthermore - of course I never paid much attention to it and I may be wrong - but I fancy that, in contemporary European MSs, digits (whether Arabic or Roman) are typically used in tables and drawings, while within the flow of text they are typically expressed "verbatim". Like, when one needs to say "three drops", he usually writes "three drops", not "3 drops".

And of course there's the Searcher's argument that the amount of reduplication pairs just exceeds the amount of digits.