[HN Gopher] What's the most efficient language?
___________________________________________________________________
What's the most efficient language?
Author : yakkomajuri
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-01-23 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yakkomajuri.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (yakkomajuri.github.io)
| sharikous wrote:
| I guessed Hebrew would be between the densest ones.
|
| In my experience using ktiv haser would make Hebrw win hands
| down. It's impressive to see how bigger is the English
| translation than the original text in translated Bible books.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Efficiency comes from mastery.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Glad to see Cantonese tops the chart. Maybe not that surprising
| afterall
| rahimiali wrote:
| A lot of valid criticism here about the measure of complexity,
| but considering the author's initial motivation, I think the
| approach makes sense: "The magazine had a little travel article,
| and it was written in English on one page and Thai on the other.
| The Thai version was so much shorter that I started to wonder if
| it was more efficient."
|
| If the goal is to identify which language would have produced the
| most subjectively visual "short article" per the description
| above, the approach sounds ok. For example, concerns with serifs,
| variations in character sizes, the information content of
| characters, etc become moot because they contribute to visual
| clutter and typography, which the author would want to count
| against the language.
| robocat wrote:
| > The Thai version was so much shorter
|
| I don't think that Thai compresses much. Here is the above
| comment I replied to, Google translated into Thai (will be
| totally incorrect but a reasonably guess to length? I would
| guess English with spaces removed would be similar length?)
|
| kaarwiphaakswicchaarnthiithuukt`ngmaakmaaythiiniiekiiywkabkaarw
| adkhwaamchabch`n aetemuue`phicchaarnaathuengaerngcchuungaiccher
| imtnkh`ngphuuekhiiynchankhidwaawithiikaarniismehtusmphl: "nitys
| aarmiibthkhwaamkaaredinthaangelkn`yaelaekhiiynepnphaasaa`angkRs
| ainhnaahnuengaelaphaasaaaithyain`iikhnaahnueng ew`rchanphaasaaa
| ithysankwaamaakcchnerimsngsaywaamanmiiprasiththiphaaphmaakkwaah
| ruue`aim"
|
| haakepaahmaaykhuue`kaarrabuwaaphaasaaaidthiicchaphlit
| "bthkhwaamsan" thiim`ngehnaid`atnaymaakthiisudtaamkhMaa`thibaay
| khaangtnwithiikaarfangduuo`ekh
| taw`yaangechnkhwaamkangwlekiiywkab serifs kaarepliiynaeplngkh`n
| gkhnaadtawlakhrenuue`haakh`muulkh`ngtawlakhr ~l~ klaayepn moot
| ephraaaphwkekhaanMaaaipsuukhwaamyungehyingthaangsaaytaaaelakaar
| phimphchuengphuuekhiiynt`ngkaarnabkabphaasaa
| dig1 wrote:
| I don't think the analysis is good here. If we want the most
| efficient _writing_ language (written representation of some
| information), that could be emoji. You can 't beat this: I .
| Three characters and can be translated (by reader) to almost any
| language without knowing target language letters and grammar.
|
| [edit]: looks like HN doesn't allow U+2615 (hot beverage)
| character.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Emojis are pretty complicated to either draw or type. While
| drawing a heart is imo easier than writing the word love,
| typing it isn't.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Three characters and can be translated (by reader) to almost
| any language without knowing target language letters and
| grammar.
|
| You have to understand what a heart symbol is, and know that
| "I" is an english pronoun and how it's used. According to
| google translate, "I love" in Chinese is Wo Ai . That's only
| two characters. Emoji is very limited in what it can express,
| and unusable if you want to write with anything else than a
| keyboard.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > You can't beat this: I .
|
| It even works with very young kids.
|
| I've "chatted" with my god daughter in WhatsApp using emojis
| way before she learnt how to read and write!
| wcoenen wrote:
| I think font selection is important to make it a fair comparison.
|
| For each language, the minimal resolution "pixel font" that still
| works should be used. (E.g. Chinese hanzi are going to require
| more resolution than the latin alphabet.) The fonts used in
| Minecraft might be a good start.
|
| However, once you do that, it probably doesn't make sense to only
| count the "on" pixels. Because in a minimal font, "off" pixels
| will probably contribute as much information as "on" pixels. So
| you should just count the total number of pixels required to
| render the piece of text.
| timbit42 wrote:
| 1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/
| jl6 wrote:
| I find there's another dimension to communication efficiency
| which is nothing to do with cramming information into bits, but
| rather is about working with a close-knit group.
|
| What does it mean to be a close-knit group? When you spend a lot
| of time working, training or living together, you tune into each
| other's frequency. You know what they are doing and how they are
| doing it. You each build a mental model of the others. You can
| focus contact time on the out-of-model communication that really
| matters. You can start to make accurate assumptions about what
| they are thinking. (This is infinite communication efficiency:
| information transmitted via zero bits!).
|
| It's like a kind of compression where your experiences together
| build a pre-shared dictionary - which of course is exactly what a
| written language is; this is a further optimization through
| customization.
|
| I've seen this kind of "co-experience-bond" communication happen
| in small teams in the workplace, and I've heard third-hand about
| it emerging in military squads.
|
| And of course my wife and I can communicate across a room with a
| look and an eyebrow.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was
| expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were
| beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters).
|
| Let's put aside the fact that this guy just equated "Chinese"
| with "Mandarin". This claim he's making suggests his entire
| measurement mechanism is broken.
|
| Simplified Chinese is more "efficient" in terms of Traditional
| Chinese only in that it requires fewer strokes to draw each
| character. But the author spent quite some time harping on
| _information_. Given that Simplified and Traditional chinese have
| (for purposes of discussion here) identical characters, just
| represented differently, from an information standpoint they are
| exactly the same. Information means something, and it is not
| number of pixels.
|
| I know this is outside the topic of the article, but it's worth
| mentioning that many Chinese scholars think Simplified Chinese
| has been a disaster. Traditional Chinese characters have strong
| visual relationships to one another depending on how they both
| sound, or whether they have similar meanings, or whether they
| were linguistically derived from the same historical source. This
| assists in memorizing them: a chinese person might come across
| some character she doesn't know but looks like a set of other
| characters, and can make a good guess as to what it actually is
| based on its relationship to them and its context in the
| sentence. The designers of Simplified Chinese broke a very large
| number of these rules: similarity didn't matter any more, just
| reduction in stroke count. As a result, Simplified Chinese is
| much harder to learn.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| Hey, appreciate the comment.
|
| The article is not about Chinese so I can't cover every bit of
| nuance associated with the language group. I have studied it
| for a bit, so I'm not completely lost in this space.
|
| But putting aside the discussion of Simplified Chinese being
| better or not, the Limitations section does say:
|
| "Maybe the fact that Chinese characters were originally
| representative drawings helps association in the brain despite
| the extra strokes?"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Given that Simplified and Traditional chinese have (for
| purposes of discussion here) identical characters, just
| represented differently, from an information standpoint they
| are exactly the same.
|
| This is not quite true; sometimes separate traditional
| characters have the same simplified form. For example,
| traditional Hou ("behind") and Hou ("empress") share the
| simplified form Hou .
| Jansen312 wrote:
| Imagine you are limited to only pen and paper and need to
| communicate with another using written Chinese. Then even
| though what you convey will be exactly same meaning and
| characters count, simplified will consumed less effort (less
| ink and paper as well) to deliver equivalent same message in
| Chinese Traditional. From language studies perspective they
| view a token as basic unit of information, but in engineering
| and practicality, OP ideas of pixel measurement would be
| better. You can't transmit information to humans using "token"
| but displayed form via pixels. As for Simplified Chinese is
| much harder to learn, let just say Mao had proven you wrong
| with vast majority Chinese (outside of China) learning
| Simplified form much faster and less effort than Traditional
| form. Even Taiwanese using simplified form to describe the name
| "tai" in Taiwan.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I'm sorry, but information means something, and it does not
| equate to number of strokes. A character can have millions of
| strokes and still convey the same information as a character
| with a single stroke.
|
| There are other measures of "efficiency" of course. If the
| author wanted to argue for how long it took to write a
| sentence, then sure, Simplified is definitely more
| "efficient" than Traditional in this context. On the other
| hand, it's pretty odd to be defining languages in terms of
| _written_ form rather than their _spoken_ form. (And I 'm not
| sure why Cantonese would be more efficient than Simplified
| Mandarin as Cantonese is normally written using traditional
| glyphs.)
|
| Anyway, the author inserted information into this discussion.
| And if efficiency is in terms of information, then this pixel
| argument doesn't hold water.
|
| As to the difficulty of simplified chinese: this is a well
| studied topic with a lot of scholarly analysis. I am pretty
| sure the literature as a whole strongly disagrees with your
| claim.
| bllguo wrote:
| uh, what? once we're talking about simplified vs.
| traditional it should already be clear that the discussion
| is about the languages in terms of written form? in fact
| the entire article makes clear that it is about written
| language.
|
| Not using "information" in a scientifically proper way is a
| fine criticism, I just don't understand why you seem to
| think the author did not define "efficiency" when it is one
| of the first points made..
|
| re: simplified chinese, i guess im bad at searching? care
| to provide a review paper?
| divingdragon wrote:
| > This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was
| expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were
| beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters).
|
| My first reaction to this is: "What? Cantonese?" I just _knew_
| something is wrong.
|
| So I checked the data and immediately see the issue.
| `yue_Hant_HK` ("Cantonese"), `zh_Hant_HK` (Chinese, Hong Kong)
| and `zh_Hant_MO` (Chinese, Macau) all uses the same text, while
| `zh_Hant` (Traditional Chinese) and `zh_Hant_TW` (Chinese,
| Taiwan) uses a different text.
|
| As it turns out, there is no Cantonese, just plain written
| Chinese (Shu Mian Yu , written language as we would call it).
| Both Hong Kong and Taiwan use the Traditional Chinese script, but
| the two don't exactly use the same vocabularies due to regional
| differences. For example, the term "privacy" is "Si Yin " in Hong
| Kong, but "Yin Si " in Taiwan. This is why there exists two
| versions of Traditional Chinese translations of the same text.
| Since they are likely done by different people (assuming they are
| not machine translations) they have different translation styles,
| which contributes to the difference in length of the two
| paragraphs.
|
| (Also, Cantonese _can_ be written in Simplified Chinese, but that
| 's all I will say regarding this topic.)
| princeb wrote:
| the writing of cantonese is a complicated affair.
|
| the only analogy i can cook up is that - imagine if formally,
| everyone wrote English in German, but when you speak you speak
| English, and when you read English you'd see German words and
| sentence structures but you will preprocess it into English
| before understanding it. and with different levels of
| formality, would You with underschiedenly Germandegrees speak
| English. but in no case would you speak German.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| For anyone wanting to undertake analysis like this, a fairly
| common choice of text for comparing languages is the UN Universal
| Declaration of Human Rights. It is translated into a staggering
| number of languages.
|
| See https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/introduction.aspx
| Kankuro wrote:
| About 10 years ago, I used the translations of KDE texts to
| estimate how much space texts in a given language could take
| when translated into another language (we had an internal web
| page editor that only allowed putting texts and widgets at
| fixed x-y coordinates, so allocating extra-space for
| translation was a sad work-around). http://fabsk.eu/i18n/#en;fr
| skydhash wrote:
| Haitian Creole speaker here. We're in a weird spot. Where the
| majority of the vocabulary come from French, the grammar from
| west African languages, and heavy influence from Spanish and
| English. Due to the majority of the population not able to write
| , the language is easy to learn and speak. But the writing is not
| as precise as French or English, making it a bit tedious when
| explaining things. Verbs only have one form, with marker words to
| indicate mode and tense. Numerous words have multiple definitions
| or are very vague, so meaning is usually conveyed across by using
| comparisons and analogy. Easy to do when talking and adding a
| storyteller like to a conversation, but tedious when writing. The
| redeeming quality is that the grammar is simple and the
| orthography more so.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole
| samatman wrote:
| The method is of course bizarrely disconnected from the goal, but
| the author does specifically say he doesn't care, when someone
| kindly pointed that out.
|
| One is left musing about the overarching purpose of such a
| document, given that.
|
| If one were continue down this road, instead of wisely and
| immediately turning tail and heading towards semioticians and
| other people who know what they're talking about: try compressing
| each font glyph instead. the big ones? have a lot of 'stuff' in
| them.
|
| This isn't uh. Robust, you feel me, against things like yeah.
| Serifs. For example but, it ain't nothing.
|
| Counting the black, on the other hand, I must concur this matters
| more to the person in the department who orders toner, than to
| the information theoretician of graphology.
| domenicrosati wrote:
| For folks who are interested. This is actually an already well
| studied topic! It is called "language complexity". The consensus
| is that in aggregate (all language artifacts like writing,
| conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex than any other
| since complexity on one dimension (say chinese writing for
| Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin morphology or
| conjugation).
|
| This is called the compensation hypothesis at least in phonology
| (how we speak a language)
|
| Pixels per character is certainly an interesting dimension of
| complexity and I would encourage the author to try to get this
| ready for publication at SIGMORPHON or something like that!
|
| See
| https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/1...
| for more on complexity
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| I've taken note to read up more on language complexity - had
| come across it before but didn't dig too deep!
| setr wrote:
| > The consensus is that in aggregate (all language artifacts
| like writing, conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex
| than any other since complexity on one dimension (say chinese
| writing for Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin
| morphology or conjugation).
|
| This doesn't sound right; it's easy to imagine a terribly
| inefficient language (replace every letter/phoneme in English
| with thousands), and probably easy to make a language that's
| worse in every aspect to an existing one
|
| Which means you should be able to go the other way, and
| identify a language more efficient in every aspect than an
| existing one, unless they've all hit maximum optimality within
| their constraints.
|
| But that's unlikely, because language is burdened by the
| constraint of history, which tends to lock inefficiencies in
| place in favor of "minimum disturbance" when introducing
| change. And since we don't care about that constraint when
| judging language efficiency, it should unlock some
| optimizations not yet applied.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > This doesn't sound right; it's easy to imagine a terribly
| inefficient language (replace every letter/phoneme in English
| with thousands), and probably easy to make a language that's
| worse in every aspect to an existing one
|
| Maybe GP was referring to actual languages, which are
| optimized by use, rather than possible languages.
| setr wrote:
| Sure, but if they can be effectively compared in _theory_
| they should also be comparable in reality.
|
| And given that languages were developed over different
| histories and constraints (and lengths of time), it seems
| to me that a "terrible" real-world language is likely
| available and identifiable. And though perhaps difficult to
| compare, then there should be a "best" language, or at
| least, "top-N" class of languages, that are clearly
| superior to their peers.
|
| It's highly unlikely that all languages are comparably
| well-optimized.
| glial wrote:
| If you can show this, you could get a publication out of
| it. Until then, you might find that reading the existing
| literature referenced by the commenter above is helpful.
| blowski wrote:
| What's the best animal? Sport? Operating system? In every
| case, it begs the question "best at what?". Same here.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I see what you're saying but in real life pretty much all
| languages are right on the efficient frontier. Just for
| instance, it turns out that in bits/second every language is
| in about the same range, with less dense languages spoken
| faster. It's not obvious a priori but the evidence bears it
| out. There are presumably small differences but they're
| pretty much washed out by noise.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The consensus is that in aggregate (all language artifacts
| like writing, conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex
| than any other since complexity on one dimension (say chinese
| writing for Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin
| morphology or conjugation).
|
| That is broadly the consensus, with a couple of exceptions:
|
| - Writing is not part of the language and doesn't factor into
| complexity anywhere. Chinese writing is much more complex than
| the writing system of most other languages, but that's just not
| relevant to the spoken language.
|
| - Some languages are believed to be generally simpler than
| average due to having gone through a phase involving a large
| number of adults learning the language. Mandarin is one of
| those languages, as is English.
| k__ wrote:
| _" Spanish from Spain ranking at 14 and Latin American Spanish
| landing at 32"_
|
| Interesting result.
|
| I tries to learn Spanish a few years ago, and read that south
| american Spanish speakers were unhappy, that people from Spain
| would say their Spanish is the true and better one, and that
| Spain decide what is Spanish and what isn't.
|
| If that experiment holds true, their decisions at least led to a
| more efficient Spanish, haha.
| leephillips wrote:
| The article continues: "The vast majority of differences are
| purely arbitrary word selections, though."
|
| He's not measuring a property of languages, but of particular
| translations of the privacy policy.
|
| By the way, sometimes North Americans encounter attitudes that
| UK English is in some way more authentic or better than their
| variety. That's silly, too, and ahistorical. The difference
| with Spanish is that, like the French, they have an Academy
| that hands down official language judgments, and these are
| taken seriously by publishers, etc. The Academy is based in
| Spain, so they have a way to sort-of enforce their linguistic
| dominance. English is more anarchic.
| DFHippie wrote:
| It's not just the absence of an a academy resisting
| linguistic change, it's that the people who brought English
| to North America _were English_ , so the dialects that have
| evolved in North America have been evolving from Old English
| just as long as the dialects in England. And moreover,
| languages don't change at a uniform rate. Until recently the
| center of linguistic change in the anglosphere was London, so
| British English, and particularly London English, was _more_
| innovative than North American dialects. I expect things have
| gotten more complicated since there are populous power
| centers outside of London now.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Also interesting is how the phonetics of some languages &
| dialects can result in faster talking.
|
| I heard that Tamil having much less number of consonants, and
| lacking the ones that need more stress (I forgot the term for
| this) makes it much faster to speak. Although Malayalam sounds
| faster to me, probably due to accent it is spoken.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| > Out of all the French dialects included in the dataset,
| Canadian was the only one with different wording. I'd be curious
| to hear from someone who speaks French about whether the Canadian
| version has words that are actually not used elsewhere or if it's
| just a matter of choice of words.
|
| As a CA_FR speaker, I think it's a bit from column A and a bit
| from column B. Tho, regional differences exists everywhere so I
| can't be absolutely certain. Proximity to EN_US and EN_UK
| probably affected CA_FR differently. Levels of language also
| affects the variety/frequency of anglicisms.
| zharknado wrote:
| This is sort of like saying "which metabolic process is most
| efficient?" across organisms. If you're sufficiently reductive
| you can answer it, but only by stripping the emergent phenomenon
| out of the evolutionary context in which it emerged, i.e. by
| choosing an arbitrary definition of "efficiency".
|
| If you ask instead which process or language is "most fit" for
| its context, the answer is probably "they're all pretty fit,
| except the ones we tried to design in a lab." Seems like it ends
| up being more interesting to ask why they ended up being
| different and how it made them more fit.
| dvh wrote:
| Slovak language have few single-letter words:
|
| a - and
|
| i - and also (archaic)
|
| k - to, towards
|
| o - about, at
|
| s - with
|
| u - near, next to
|
| v - in, inside
|
| z - from
| beebeepka wrote:
| With the exception of "z - from", all of these are true in
| Bulgarian. It's just that we use "ot" which means "from".
|
| I think I am going to like central Europe.
| dvh wrote:
| "od" also means "from" but that's 2 characters.
| forinti wrote:
| I started learning Russian when the pandemic started, and I
| found it to be more concise than the other languages I'm
| familiar with.
|
| Many phrases omit the verb, the case system precludes the need
| for connecting words, and also many little words are two or
| more words in other languages (tuda - to there, siuda - to
| here, etc).
| snidane wrote:
| Slavic languages are quite simple to pick up because their
| writing and reading systems are almost the same. You can
| predict the sounds by the consistent rules of prununciation.
| Especially with the slavic languages which underwent
| modernization amd simplification late middle ages when
| adopting the latin script.
|
| If they got rid of the complex morphology ala English, they
| could become the ultimate efficient languages.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Congratulations, you just made the distinction between
| synthetic and analytical languages.
| fourtrees wrote:
| This is more to the general readership.
|
| Well, no, he's discovered the difference between non-
| logographic orthographies that map spoken sound to
| graphemes at a close to one-to-one ratio (like Spanish or
| German where 'a' usually mean /a/ and those that don't,
| like English or Irish, assign one graph to a multitude of
| speech sounds. This is old news to most of you, but
| consider 'g' or 'sh' (which represents one phoneme). but
| 'g' can be alternately represent the sounds in Geronimo,
| good, through, gnat, tongue, and probably others I'm
| forgetting (ng). Plenty of other graphemes follow suit.
|
| Analytical and synthethic languages alter meaning through
| predominantly differeent morphosyntactic mechanisms (and
| then meaning and pronunciation follow) Analytic languages
| are like Sanskrit or Turkish. Many changes in meaning come
| from altering the word by a suffix or the like or by
| phonemic alterations like vowel harmony (we still have a
| little of both in English perhaps) Analytic languages like
| Chinese, English, or French rely on (1) altering the word
| order to accomplish mostly the same thing. Again, it's a
| spectrum, and English has its fair share of analytic
| features. Synthetic languages might be a bit easier to
| learn, but any argument for the superiority of a single
| synthethetic language has to account for a plethora of
| typological features, like pitch, morphosyntactic
| alignment, pronunciation, pragmatics, elisions, clitics,
| particles, and so forth, that must be learnt. Any argument
| for the superiority of them as a whole runs into trouble at
| least at the point where languages seems to alternate
| between the two extremes.
|
| To go off topic b/c its sunday and im bored: there is no
| strong deductive proof among linguists that words exist
| universally. I mean that many languages, especially the
| lesser-contacted ones, and especially those in North
| American, whose languages feature one l o n g word or two
| that convey the same meaning as ten in English. To a
| speaker of Mohawk the category 'word' has to have little
| use. As does syntax (but not morphology! This leads me to
| wonder how much the word is a written convention or limited
| geographically. We once assumed that there were at most
| three genders. Since then we've discovered languages with
| >7 and 0 genders (noun classes). Likewise, other languages
| have different parts of speech. Korean features a prominent
| topic-marker and a class of adjectives that occupy the the
| verb's position in the sentence and function like a
| predicate. They need that those words to make sense of
| communication; English speakers really don't. Is perhaps
| the word also a concept that some groups have need of and
| others do not.
|
| On to the main topic, and particularly addressing the OP.
| Be careful not to confuse language with the script(s)
| they're written in. The to do not correlate beyond giving
| the an archeologist the ability to tell a logographic
| language from an alphabet. You project is cool when looking
| at various scripts from around the world. Secondly, be
| careful to claim, even in passing that rapidity/efficiency
| is superior. The Japanese nobility used to take eight
| seconds before beginning or continuing a conversation to
| allow for contemplation. The Ents had a similar convetion.
| There are benefits to the slow and inefficient. Clarity in
| speech is only one example.
|
| Anyhow, an afternoon well spent.
| stewbrew wrote:
| "The magazine had a little travel article, and it was written in
| English on one page and Thai on the other."
|
| Interesting Sunday study but language is supposed to be spoken.
| Arab and Hebrew skip vowels in written texts so they seem to be
| more efficient. But filling in these vowels requires cognitive
| extra work. That's why both languages offer extra notation for
| people who aren't that experienced with the written form. Does it
| make a difference when speaking a language?
| nekcihc wrote:
| Wasn't there recently an article about bits of information per
| second, that all languages more or less are delivering the same
| information(tone differences, stress and other audial information
| also delivers information):
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...
|
| Given the fact that Chinese writing is used for communication for
| various people, that each have their own language, the main
| component in learning Chinese is not about learning language -
| how to pronounce words, but what these characters mean -
| universally in all those languages - even English or Spanish
| people might communicate with Chinese if they knew meanings of
| Chinese "writing". This is big advantage when various people have
| to live together in one country, but the main disadvantage over
| alphabetic writing is that it is not easy to mass educate people
| to learn thousands of graphical representations and combinations
| of those "writings", than to learn 20-40 alphabetic letters,
| that(more or less) are related to sounds.
|
| IMO, English is worst alphabetical language, and it is standing
| out, as it has not modernized it's alphabet(like rest of
| Europeans did 100-200 years ago) and most people learn English
| not from what they can read(it does not help, that various 20+
| Brittish dialects can pronounce words differently), but binding
| to memory what is written - almost the same way how Chinese do.
| From my experience, there is staggering amount of written
| illiteracy among native British people, that I have never seen
| compared to other Europeans. Because of this experience, my
| English has become worse(some of the mistakes can not be blamed
| on keyboard), that what it used to be - also I don't care about
| errors anymore, because I have adapted to locals.
|
| PS I think, that knowing different languages is like being
| different human. There are some languages, that makes you act
| very stressful and fast talking, and then there are some
| languages that are slower and where you can think before saying
| something. There is also difference between how jokes are
| present.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Clearly this isn't intended as a serious way of "ranking"
| languages, but I wish there was a way to measure the "efficiency"
| of languages from the same geographic setup (and, preferably,
| family) but in different time periods, e.g. Akkadian vs.
| Babylonian vs. early Hebrew vs. early Arabic.
|
| One would expect the efficiency to improve over time, but maybe
| this is not true.
|
| Is there anything in this topic that one can read?
| zeroimpl wrote:
| I'm also curious how modern languages compare to older
| variants. Even modern English to Shakespeare stuff.
|
| I think to measure efficiency of a written language, you'd have
| to time how long it takes people to read it (and correctly
| answer some questions to prove they understood it).
| sam_goody wrote:
| Some years ago I came across a handbook of Pittman shorthand.
|
| I figured most of the time I spend reading is spent scanning the
| words with my eyes. Shorthand is so much more concise, it would
| surely save me time if I wrote a text-to-shorthand converter
| [ViolentMonkey], and then learned to read shorthand.
|
| After much time learning shorthand, and fiddling with programming
| a conversion script, I got frustrated. So I wrote to one of the
| world's experts on Pittman shorthand (you can find anything on
| the net) and asked her about my project.
|
| Surprisingly, she said that even for her, a world expert, she
| reads Pittman at the same speed she reads non shorthand text. Due
| to the density of the shorthand, and the fact that the mind has
| to decode it, makes it slower to read!!
|
| Anyways, I never finished, but at least I learned the basics of
| shorthand :)
|
| For the uninitiated, before computers, dictation was very slow,
| and reporters needed a faster way to record what they were
| hearing. They came up with various scripts, wherein lines
| represent sounds, and for a while these were taught in every
| college. Till today, shorthand is faster than typing, and there
| are reporters keypads that have created a shorthand for the
| keyboard, which is even faster. Much faster.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| While intersting, and the methodlogy has valid critique. I wish
| there were a figure plotting the results clearly. Such
| qualitiative reporting made the whole thing feel more opaque.
| rendall wrote:
| > _Mina rakastan kahvia_
|
| This is like saying "I feel intimate of coffee". Finns wouldn't
| say that. _Rakasta_ is translated as love but it 's the kind of
| love reserved for immediate family or lovers, not just things you
| like a lot, and _kahvi_ is in the wrong case, like having the
| wrong preposition.
|
| _Mina pidan paljon kahvista_ is a more normal way to say "I
| like coffee a lot". The English "to love" doesn't really have a
| good translation in Finnish.
|
| And, since it's about efficiency, you can lop off the pronoun,
| since the verb conjugation implies it:
|
| _Pidan paljon kahvista_
|
| And, just a bit of soft context, the Finnish way of speaking is
| often terse, so if a Finn is saying they like something, it often
| had the same degree as when an American says they love something,
| otherwise they wouldn't bother mentioning it. So, you can get rid
| of the "much", too:
|
| _Pidan kahvista_
| hackerknows wrote:
| This paper measures the efficiency as Shannon information
| calculated on a Google corpus correlated against word length:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526
|
| This paper shows that speaker size correlates close to .9 with
| efficiency:
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.019...
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Counting pixels in a block of text to determine information
| density doesn't sound like a very robust method to me. You could
| get very different results depending on the font you use to
| render the text.
| childintime wrote:
| English could be rendered in a 4x3 font (or even 3x3 font)..
|
| In this test it'll comfortably beat out any other language.
|
| See:
| https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/325977/4x3_pixel
| timbit42 wrote:
| 1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/
| peterashford wrote:
| thats cool, but looking at that font, I'm not sure I'd be
| able to tell an 'e' from a 'c' if there was no context. Eg:
| "figure e5" wouldn't be clear to me (but "colour" would be)
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Another approach might be to take some large, well translated
| text and measure compressed sizes of it in different languages.
| With a good enough compression algorithm that will take into
| account used character set size differences as well as common
| word lengths, etc.
| mynegation wrote:
| This is a metric that is relatively simple to calculate but
| probably not a good approximation. If I were to do that though,
| I would choose the effective bit length of the symbol in the
| language, i.e. log_2(number of symbols in the writing system)
| jsnell wrote:
| It is worse than just sensitivity to different fonts, it ends
| up being sensitive to totally incidental details of the glyphs.
| In a Latin script, all the letters carry as much information.
| But this metric would treat a lowercase i as much more
| efficient than a capital W.
| Redoubts wrote:
| Isn't that intentional? Picking sprawling glyphs for common
| items, and simple ones for rare meanings would be
| "inefficient" in some interesting sense. Indeed 'i' is the
| most common letter in Latin.
| Zababa wrote:
| I think the measure here is "information density on a physical
| surface". For example, someone commented on a 4x3 font for
| English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046035. This
| allows you to put way more information on a pixel surface, but at
| the cost (at least to my eyes) of time spent reading, as this
| font is harder (at least to me) to read. Which I would compare to
| more efficient compression algorithm, that take more time to
| encode/decode.
|
| This could be used when storing information on a physical media,
| like a book or a microfilm.
| timbit42 wrote:
| 1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/
| Zababa wrote:
| I like it, but I would describe it as an encoding more than a
| font. I also think it's 1x5, not 1x8. In that case, it would
| be more than twice as efficient as the 4x3. In a way, it's a
| restricted ascii subset.
| WJW wrote:
| I wonder if Hebrew scores so high because most words leave out
| the vowels. There are technically annotations on the consonants
| about which vowel should be pronounced, but outside primary
| school and language schools for immigrants nobody seems to use
| them. Arabic has a similar setup, I'm not familiar with Gujaranti
| but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to have a very
| similar setup.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Hebrew also omits the verb "to be". It is assumed in most
| cases, and tenses and possessives are denoted in suffixes.
| Prepositions become prefixes, as does the word "the."
|
| So "I am happy" is
|
| ny shmkh
|
| (Ani Sameach lit. "I Happy")
|
| And
|
| "The book is in the house" is
|
| hspr nmts bbyt
|
| HaSefer (the book) Nimtza (is avaiable) B'Bayet (in [the]
| house).
|
| Six words become three.
|
| (Hebrew was my second language, after Yiddish. Grew up in
| Brooklyn, and learned "English" on the streets.)
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Interesting. Spanish on the other hand is very flexible with
| ommiting the subject.
|
| So "I am happy" would become "(Yo) estoy feliz" or (I) am
| happy.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Well h (the) and b (in/at) might be comparable "words" too,
| so more like 6 words become 5.
| kbrannigan wrote:
| So English was your third language? That's fascinating
| messe wrote:
| > Six words become three.
|
| Sure, but should you be counting words or morphemes as a
| measure of complexity?
| samatman wrote:
| glsh cld wn ths cntst hndly if we chs crflly nd use th occsnl
| matrs lctinis
| linux2647 wrote:
| "English could win this contest handily if we chose carefully
| and use the occasional ..."?
| tomsmeding wrote:
| Probably "matres lectionis":
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis (probably
| should have been "mater lectionis" (mtr lctinis?) given the
| rest of the sentencr ;) )
|
| I didn't know this term existed, but the letters felt like
| Latin to me.
|
| Presumably the point is to use some well-chosen vowels
| where they are necessary for disambiguation.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| My guess is "amateurish elocutionist" but I needed computer
| assistance: $ for t in matrs lctinis; do
| echo; grep '.*'$(echo $t | sed 's/./&.*/g')
| /usr/share/dict/words | grep -Ev "s$"; done
| Amaterasu amateurish amateurism
| humanitarianism masterstroke materialism
| materialist materialistic materialistically
| maturest metatarsal miniaturist
| misanthropist elocutionist
|
| For my own amusement, I also came up with another
| grammatically plausible "parsimonious" (inserting the
| fewest extra letters) interpretation:
|
| > Galosh-clad win this contest handily if we chase
| carefully and use the occasional mantras, elocutionist!
| sarabande wrote:
| This is great! As someone who immediately recognized it
| as 'mater lectionis' I wondered how someone unfamiliar
| with this aspect of Hebrew would attempt to solve the
| puzzle.
| golemiprague wrote:
| pippy wrote:
| I've often felt that English is a prime candidate for spelling
| reform. Being the modern lingua franca it makes sense to remove
| the unneeded vestigial remnants of other languages that adds
| extra unneeded complexity. For some reason it seems that English
| majors seem to be dead set against it, as they love etymology.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I'm a little bit confused at the assertion that "cart" and "cat"
| are phonetically similar enough to need an extra letter. They're
| completely different sounds to my admittedly en-GB ears.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I suggest you read it again. That is not the assertion at all:
|
| > Consider the r in cart for instance. Without that r the word
| would clash with an existing word - cat, so the letter is
| significant in establishing meaning. The u in color is not,
| however.
|
| The point is that what we call a "cart" and a "cat" are
| different things, and that the additional letter "r" helps us
| differntiate these two things, because we get two different
| words (rather than, say, calling both things "cat" or "cart").
| By contrast, there is nothing called "color" in British
| English, so dropping the "u" from "color" creates no ambiguity
| in meaning.
| willis936 wrote:
| It's interesting, but flawed. Pixels don't matter, the
| cardinality of the set of characters does.
|
| You could replace every kanji with a minimal visual entropy
| version and make a "more efficient" language by the pixel
| complexity metric. Sure, it'd be hard to read.
|
| Information theory applied to linguistics is pretty well trodden
| ground. Some of the earliest applications of information theory
| was answering questions like this correctly.
|
| Importantly, languages do not evolve to be "maximally efficient"
| in the bits per second sense. They evolved to be maximally
| effective. You'll find that the difference between entropy and
| word length (written or spoken) is almost entirely spent on
| channel coding. When you lose characters, or parts of characters,
| or words, or phonemes, the meaning can be recovered. If you were
| running at entropy a lost character would make the entire message
| nonsense.
|
| Edit: the same goes for visual entropy too. The "most efficient"
| language is the one I just made up: where the language with the
| largest cardinality of words (I'll pick Kanji) has each character
| mapped to a unique bitmap of noise. Easier to just leave the
| characters as they are and let the computer do that part ;)
| smitty1e wrote:
| Using a fixed, non-trivial passage is helpful for normalizing
| across languages.
|
| One wonders what the literature has to say regarding
| generalizing information across topics.
|
| Is it easier to convey some topics in some languages? For
| example, Philosophy in Greek?
|
| In our day, such inquiry may not be possible due to Political
| Correctness.
| willis936 wrote:
| It is obscene to suggest political motivations for a strawman
| that does not exist. If you did a simple google search for
| "linguistics information theory" you would find that there
| are _still_ studies constantly coming out.
|
| Divorce yourself from your political tribe for just one
| moment out of the day.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Hey, you are right, totally. But the tone of your reply is
| off.
|
| Take it easy, it is not so important.
| willis936 wrote:
| Not at all. People are so consumed by feed that they
| benefit from a shock. I doubt some words on a screen from
| a human will do that, but I'd like to think that I tried.
| reil_convnet wrote:
| I am not sure whether I agree with the analysis, maybe will take
| more time to process whether the pixels metric really means
| efficiency.
|
| However, one interesting point is that the author concludes
| "Hebrew" and "Gujrati" are the most efficient languages. The
| cultures to which these languages belong are both stereotyped to
| be very efficient and pragmatic businesspeople. So maybe they
| have a general culture which reflects in their day to day
| activities, even writing.
|
| Arabic [which is the third on the list] also belongs to a people
| who traditionally have been associated with trade, before they
| found all the black gold.
| golemiprague wrote:
| albatrosstrophy wrote:
| I speak both a 'most efficient' language (Arabic) and a 'least
| efficient' (Malay).
|
| My take ia that while Arabic is a very concise language, the
| learning curve is really steep. Verbs has to be conjugated to
| accommodate pronouns as well as tense. So in order to say 'I
| ate', the root word akala has to be conjugated to akaltu.
| Sometimes the conjugation becomes so complex that it hardly looks
| like its root word.
|
| Malay meanwhile, while seemingly less efficient, is much more
| straight forward. There is no need to conjugate verbs. Instead to
| say 'I ate', you say saya (I) sudah (already) makan (eat). It's
| very accessible to beginners.
|
| I think it's also interesting to see how complex a language can
| get in order to become efficient. Like can you combine more than
| pronouns and tenses in a single word to make it more efficient.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Just like a programming language, in fact.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Humans are mutually programming each other using homoiconic
| phonetic languages.
| umvi wrote:
| Or like CPU architectures. CISC vs RISC
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > I think it's also interesting to see how complex a language
| can get in order to become efficient. Like can you combine more
| than pronouns and tenses in a single word to make it more
| efficient.
|
| Spanish has an interesting way of linking verbs and pronouns
| together:
|
| For example: daselo would be translated to English as: "(You)
| give it to him/her"
|
| Or: pasaselas would be "(You) pass those to them"
| [deleted]
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