Data is Beautiful

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.

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.

Yes but they also utilize smell.

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.

LMFAO PNY USB that's poetic

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

Traipse?

That's the full sentence asking if you want to run around aimlessly.

They solved that by not pronouncing half the language.

Variability in the length of words, loads of very short and very long words? Just a guess

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.

Both of those languages LOVE to compound their nouns - smashing smaller words into massive ones. Like the simple "pasta + asciutta = pastasciutta = dried pasta" or not simple "Donau­dampfschifffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitän = Danube steamship transport company captain". All languages do it, but these do it with gusto.

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.

hand gestures

🤌

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.

The words are very modular and systematic, but you seemingly pay a price for it.

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.

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.