Substitution Explorer

What are verse substitutions?

In Kalevala-meter poetry, verses are often repeated with one or more words changed. When "kuld on all ja kuld on pääl" is echoed as "paas on all ja paas on pääl", the words "kuld" (gold) and "paas" (limestone) form a substitution pair. These pairs reveal the conceptual associations embedded in the folk poetic tradition.

Pair types

Semantic (s) — words that substitute for each other with different meanings (e.g., ema/isa, kuld/hõbe).
Morphological (m) — the same root word in different grammatical forms (e.g., dialectal variants).

Source algorithms

Both ★ both — found by both cross-poem and parallelism algorithms (highest confidence).
Cross-poem (XP) XP — words that substitute across different poems in the same tradition.
Parallelism (CP) CP — words in parallel positions within the same poem's verse structure.

Quality tiers

Gold — confirmed by both algorithms or 50+ occurrences.
Silver — 10+ occurrences or cross-poem with 5+ occurrences.
Bronze — lower-frequency pairs still present in the data.

Network graph

The network shows the searched word in the center with its substitution partners arranged around it. Edge thickness represents how often the pair appears together. Node color indicates language (blue = Estonian, red = Finnish). Click any partner node to explore its substitution network.

Scores

Count — how many times this pair appears in parallel verses across the corpus.
Jaccard — the Jaccard similarity of the verse contexts where these words appear (higher = more similar contexts).