218
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
218 points (99.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35868 readers
345 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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. Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
Is there anything to that? Or was that just nonsense?
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.
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.
Does anyone know how the amount of information is actually derived? The article just says “researchers calculated”
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.)
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.
It's similar, but not exactly the same by any stretch. But, yeah, it's not a perfect method. But, there probably isn't a perfect method. How would you decide what "1 unit of information" is?
I wouldn’t, because I have no knowledge in the field. But since the paper hinges upon that exact definition, and “They were vague about it”, this raises the biggest red flag I’ve seen in science yet.
This is true.
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.
Oh, interesting. I hadn't considered that there would be variances in information density within a language, but that makes sense; "truth" is a very loaded concept that means a lot of different things in context, even though it's only one syllable; but on the other hand "authenticity" is five syllables but carries with it a meaning that is a subset of the definition of "truth."
I guess that's why subtitling is even possible in different languages; if there were languages with vastly less information density than the source language, they'd need a whole screen just for the captions.
Fairly nonsense If anything I'd say it's the other way around -- there are lots of words in Hindi/Malayalam that you need 5 or 6 English words to describe
It's not nonsense. Information density isn't about number of words. It's about duration and complexity of communication. And it is fairly consistent across all languages. Some languages take 3 words to say something the other can say in one, but those 3 words probably take a similar amount of brainpower and time to communicate as the one word.