Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower.
This is true.
Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
I don’t think that’s the right interpretation. There are words in English that would require sentences to be made for each if conveyed in a different language. But the same is true vice-versa.
Have a look at subtitles for movies from one language to any other. Translators struggle conveying what should be paragraph long sentences of context behind a single word for one language. Do not get me started on double speak.
merc@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Someone posted a link to just that topic here. Apparently almost all languages transmit about 39 bits per second of data. Italians use 9 syllables per second, Germans only about 5-6, but both convey the same amount of information per second. But, not all syllables are equal. Japanese has about 5 bits per syllable, English has about 7 bits per syllable. The most information dense language per syllable is apparently Vietnamese with about 8 bits per syllable.
Apparently though, the bottleneck is the brain. The end result seems to be that languages that have fewer “bits of data” per syllable say those syllables more quickly, and the ones with fewer bits of data per syllable say those syllables more slowly, so that the average is about 39 bits per second no matter what the language.
Having said that, I often listen to podcasts sped up to 1.5x speed, and I listen to podcasts while doing other things, so I guess the bottleneck is probably on the sending side rather than the receiving side.
takeheart@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Podcasts, being prerecorded and edited, don’t really fit this model. It’s more for a conversation with a back and forth where both interlocutors don’t know ahead of time what the other person will say. So they need to observe/listen, reflect while also coming up with answers and putting effort into being properly understood. So basically the natural context in which inter human communication evolved.
ytg@feddit.ch 3 months ago
Does anyone know how the amount of information is actually derived? The article just says “researchers calculated”
merc@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
They were vague about it, but they said something about converting it to computer code. I would guess they just wrote it out as ASCII text and counted how many bits of ASCII equivalent they transmitted. (Of course this ignores intonation and emphasis, but I’d guess they did ignore those.)
bleistift2@feddit.de 2 months ago
If that’s really what they did, it’s stupid. First, you need to find a translation for every language to ASCII, which will wildly skew the results. Second, there are many ways to express the same concept, which all vary wildly in length. Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.