It's fascinating that while languages vary wildly by speaking speed, information transfer is fairly similar.
It's fascinating that while languages vary wildly by speaking speed, information transfer is fairly similar.
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English is pictured as such a smooth, almost perfectly normalized bell curve. On one hand it's such a versatile language that (largely due to colonialism) has undergone so much evolution and mixing with other languages that I can believe that. On the other hand it looks almost too normal. Odd.
On the other hand it looks almost too normal. Odd.
It could indicate bias on the part of the researchers. I haven't read their methodology, but in my amateur study of languages, some languages have some interesting tricks for communication that don't translate to English well or efficiently. If English was used as the baseline, then the study ma not incorporate some of the neat things other languages can do as points to measure.
Mandarin has a word particle to communicate "completed action". This is used instead of conjugating verbs for tenses. Example: in English you might say:
"I went to the shop" 5 syllables
In Mandarin the literal translation back to English would be:
"I go to the shop [completed action]" 5 syllables
For the two measures listed of essentially Information Density and Speech Velocity, this benefit wouldn't show up, but if you're measure for something like Encoding and Decoding Burden (I'm making up these terms), then Mandarin could rank higher.
Looking up the article the baseline is French and English I'd say. So it might be biased, but I didn't read the article and even if I did, I'm a chemical engineer so what do I know of this field.
Could be bias. But, I wonder if it could be because English has borrowed so much from other languages.
It’s also interesting that English and French look so similar in the graphs. Both, have been the de facto international language for a long time.