I am pretty skeptical about these results in general. I would like to see the original research paper, but they usually
- write the text to be read in English, then translate them into the target languages.
- recurit test participants from
USwestern university campuses.
And then there’s the question of how do you measure the amount of information conveyed in natural languages using bits…
Yeah, the results are mostly likely very skewed.
So I did a quick pass through the paper, and I think it’s more or less bullshit. To clarify, I think the general conclusion (different languages have similar information densities) is probably fine. But the specific bits/s numbers for each language are pretty much garbage/meaningless.
First of all, speech rates is measured in number of canonical syllables, which is a) unfair to non-syllabic languages (e.g. (arguably) Japanese), b) favours (in terms of speech rate) languages that omit syllables a lot. (like you won’t say “probably” in full, you would just say something like “prolly”, which still counts as 3 syllables according to this paper).
And the way they calculate bits of information is by counting syllable bigrams, which is just… dumb and ridiculous.
So if I’m reading this right, French (closely followed by English) tends to convey the most info per unit time?
As a french, I’m very surprised by this, as when I see a text in French side-by-side with its English translation, the English version is usually shorter. It may be a difference between speech and text, but it’s still surprising.
I really thought the information density of French was pretty low, compared to English or Breton, for example.
spoiler
as a fr*nch 🤢
Spoiler didnt work ;)
Written French is slow (needs more words )
Spoken French IS faster
Yes but they also utilize smell.
Poor Thai down there at the bottom, speaking slowly and transferring information slowly.
Thai, the PNY USB stick of languages, apparently.
Actually fewer syllables per second is good, means you’re spending less effort speaking. It’s the ratio of information/syllables you want to maximize. Which means German/English/Mandarin/Vietnamese are roughly on par as the most “efficient” languages.
Some languages have fewer vowel sounds while others have an insane number (in Europe that would be Danish).
Thai has a lot, so speakers need to speak more slowly so the listener has time to distinguish words. But it also means that you can have more words per syllable.
It’s not about efficiency per se - it’s data and error correction
Just to add - Thai has a tonal system and distinguishes rising, low, medium, high and falling tones. This requires a bit more time to say so that there is time for the tone to change (or not change).
This was one of the weirdest things I had to learn when I was learning spanish. The sounds are much faster but the information density was similar. For me as an english native speaker it felt like I was listening to a machine gun at first. Eventually I trained my ear and now both languages sound the same speed.
This is also why, to me, rapidly spoken natural Spanish and Japanese sound oddly similar if I hear it out of “the corner” of my ear, so to speak.
Which is funny cause I kinda speak Spanish lol
In Finnish, I can simply ask, “Juoksenneltaisiinko?” whereas in English, I have to say, “Should we run around aimlessly?”
Traipse?
That’s the full sentence asking if you want to run around aimlessly.
Interesting word, I hadn’t heard of that one before. While not exactly perfect translation, it seems like a similar kind of word nevertheless. Doesn’t exactly seem to refer to running directly though.
I guess that in the case of my example, it’s more of a demonstration of how weirdly Finnish language can work. Juosta = run, juoksennella = run around aimlessly, juoksenneltaisiinko? = should we run around aimlessly?
Yeah but no-one would ever really use a word like that. It’s just the example given in all memes, but a a more realistic one than epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhään. I think it would be more probable that in that scenario, a Finn might say something like “pitäiskö juoksennella vähäse?”
But it is a good feature we have, yeah. Imagine trying to learn all those, whereas now they just come more or less naturally. (For that wordmonster, it takes a bit of concentration and I’m still unsure whether I typoed or not but whatever.)
Frolic?
Not the same thing. The complete sentence in English would be “do you want to frolic with me?”, which in Finnish is mashed together in a single word as the example given above. The chaining is something like “frolic-aimlessly-us-youwanna?”, though not by words but by endings.
I’d like a visual of how much unnecessary elaboration different languages commonly use to make a point.
Though you can elaborate excessively for fun but how much is common?
And on the other end of the scale text speak is often extremely concise (not me tho ha). Would be cool to see and compare the limits.What produces the stretched graphs like Italian and German? What do these humps mean?
Variability in the length of words, loads of very short and very long words? Just a guess
That is likely part of it and also explains why languages like Japanese are more tightly grouped, as there is less spread in word length for Japanese versus English or Italian.
Maybe they didn’t account for various factors like age or mood.
Moreover, Munic has 130 words per minute and dortmund has 180 words. There’s a ddifference in the dialect
https://preply.com/de/blog/sprechtempo-in-deutschland/ the numbers are just estimations and not a hard fact.
I would guess, if it’s solid empirical work behind this, that there’s just greater differences internally between German and Italian speakers than for many other languages. Having lived in both Germany and Italy, I do not struggle to believe this is the case.
My hump my hump my hump, my lovely language lumps.
Inaccurate for Italian because 50% of the language is conveyed by auditory volume, hand gestures and body language … and espresso, lots and lots of espresso.
Turkish is also inaccurate because 25% of the language is in the eyes … those intense eyes where you can’t tell if someone is excited, energetic, full of life or psychotic / murderous.
hand gestures
🤌
That’s what I mean … just that hand gesture depending on who made it and in what circumstance just conveys a ton of information without saying a word.
It could mean … “hey that was fantastic spaghetti and the sauce was wonderful”
Or it could mean … “that was a ballsy move you did last night … imma gonna keep my eye on you and burn down your house next week”
Speaking of “data is beautiful”, IMO a 2D scatter plot would be very useful for visualizing this relationship. This chart does provide the distribution for each language, as opposed to just the average, but at the expense of making correlation (or lack thereof) difficult to see.
Also, the ratio of the largest to the smallest value for syllables per second and for bits per second appears to be fairly similar. I have to eyeball values but it looks like Japanese : Thai is 8.0 : 4.7 for syllables per second (so 1.7) whereas French : Thai is 48 : 34 (so 1.4) for bits per second.
For each language, the distribution of syllable rate looks very much like the distribution of bit rate. I would like to see a chart of bits per syllable. Oh, and I wonder how this affects reading speed and the rate of information transfer via reading, especially for different spoken languages that use similar written characters.
The French/English/German curves are interesting, given the relationships between them.
I wonder if this implies English has more in common with French than German.
Or how the German and Italian curves are so similar, does that reflect a similarity in language or in how it’s used (cultural)?
English is vocabulary wise a neolatin language like french. More than 50% of english words are of latin origin, from roman latin to anglo-norman-french to modern french. English has also lost almost all noun declinations present in german and old english, with the exception being the genitive 's like dog’s tail), and the plural, that takes an -s suffix (apple apples), which makes it similar to french and neolatin languages. So, there is something to it.
yeah but, while most of the english vocabulary is romance-based, the grand majority of what we actually use in daily life is germanic
English has a lot in common with both, being a language that has been bludgeoned by both.
Isn’t it the other way round? The english having bludgeoned the other languages and made the result theirs? And english and german both are west germanic languages and share a common ancestor.
No. English got its French words after William the Conqueror of Normandy (France) invaded England and conquered the Anglo Saxons.
Huge amounts of English vocabulary came to us through French. English shares structure with Germanic languages, and retains some vocabulary, but a lot of what remains is considered the “vulgar” term for a thing, while the Romance-root word is the “proper” one. Largely thanks to the Norman conquest if I recall. French was the court language.
If I’m misremembering I’m sure someone will correct me. It’s been 20+ years since I took Latin 😂
That was the issue I had with my elementary school spanish teacher. He spoke so fast that you just couldn’t latch onto anything. It just sounded like DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDS aqui. DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDRS agostos.
Turkish seems inefficient. You spend the effort to talk quickly but don’t get the reward of high info transfer speed like Spanish.
The words are very modular and systematic, but you seemingly pay a price for it.
I would imagine this is because there is a ‘comfortable’ rate of information exchange in human conversation, and so each given language will be spoken at a pace that achieves this comfortable rate.
So it’s not that the syllable rate coincidentally results in the same information rate, but the opposite - the syllable rate adjusts to match the desired information rate.
Interesting thought.
I’d add it’s probably also that 90%+ of conversation isn’t about “data transfer” in the technical sense, but relationship building. So information volume isn’t usually crucial.
Now let’s see this work done in technical fields, especially change management, maintenance, emergency services, etc, where time is crucial. Those environments tend to have very “coded” language, so we don’t have to say a paragraph whenever we call for a very specific function/tool/action.
I suspect the languages would still have similar curves, but the data rates would increase.
I believe the percentage for information exchange is a bit higher, even in everyday life. I mean we also socialize, talk about the weather etc. But many times I open my mouth, I actually want to convey some information or gather some… That probably varies widely between cultures (and individual people and rhe exact social setting). I read some people like to chat with their cashiers while others don’t. And for relationship building we also have body language etc so lots of that doesn’t even need verbal language.
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.
Wollen sie etwa behaupten, die Informationsübermittlungsgeschwindigkeit der deutschen Sprache sei unterdurchschnittlich? So eine Unverschämtheit!
