Recently published research in an article in the journal Chaos is based on an analysis of James Joyce's work Finnegans Wake, the one from which Murray Gell-Mann took the spelling of the word 'quark' for the most fundamental constituents of matter. It turns out that the piece, which is full of metaphors and words adapted from about 70 different languages, has its own punctuation pattern.
A team of scientists from IFJ PAN discovered that the work departs from the rules of punctuation, which are generally rigid in European literature. Punctuation marks in literature generally follow a pattern called the Weibull distribution. This distribution states that the longer an uninterrupted sequence of words in a text, the more likely it is that a punctuation mark will appear after the next word. Joyce's last works are the only known literature that is not subject to the rigors of Weibull's distribution.
"Finnegans Wake" has the unique property that the probability of punctuating a sequence of words decreases with the length of the sequence. This possibility, in particular, allows for greater freedom in arranging the relationships between the lengths of subsequent sentences. In the case of "Finnegans Wake" these relationships have a particularly symmetrical form, corresponding to a mathematical phenomenon called "multifractality", in which patterns repeat within each other.
T. Stanisz, St. Drożdż, J. Kwapień
Statistics of punctuation in experimental literature - The remarkable case of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Chaos 34, 083124 (2024)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0203530
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1054818
https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/mathematics/finnegans-wake-punctuation-patterns/