This recently came up for LLM coding tools:
Comment on What if programmers rewrote the English language?
Godort@lemmy.ca 2 weeks agoStudies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate
Is this only true in speech? Japanese as an example is much more dense in text than English and can convey more information in fewer written characters.
But, those characters take longer to write and often have multisyllabic pronunciation, so speech would be unaffected.
speculate7383@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Yes, of course I’m talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn’t change the spoken language at all.
(I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you’ve put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)