7 ms·

Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

110 points by metellus 15y ago

saintfiends 15y ago
I would have thought it is because when familiar patterns of syllables are heard we tend to concentrate more on context and meaning. While the other makes you concentrate more on the syllables itself.
- aik 15y ago
  I believe that is in line with their findings. Since Japanese has more syllables than any other tested language (where nearly every other letter is a vowel) it would make sense that a faster rate of unknown syllables flying by would result in the perception of faster speech. It's interesting that while the Japanese have such a focus on efficiency, their spoken and written language is potentially more contrary to this value than any other language out there.
  - A1kmm 15y ago
    > Since Japanese has more syllables than any other tested language The article claims less information is encoded in each syllable, not more (as would be expected if more syllables were available). The Japanese syllabaric alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are larger than the roman alphabet, but the smaller alphabet doesn't mean that Japanese has more syllables than English. English syllables are written using multiple roman letters, and there are far more combinations possible than in hiragana or katakana (hiragana and katakana do allow small letters written between characters to modify the syllables represented, but even taking this into account, there are far more syllables possible when writing English). On top of this, written hiragana or katakana maps unambiguously to the spoken language, but with English, there is more than one possible pronunciation for many character sequences, and the speaker often needs to know the word and sometimes even how it fits into the sentence to know which of several possible syllables to pronounce.
    - aangjie 15y ago
      I would love to find the original paper and examine the actual measure of information they used. i have found that my mother tongue tamil which are known for the speed, has a greater range for context-sensitive interpretations compared to English.So much so that i prefer English in any communication related to work.
    - narism 15y ago
      So basically, it's bus width vs. clock rate. Although it looks like there is a natural upper bound on throughput. One thing the article doesn't mention but the paper goes into is the syllabic complexity. Vietnamese and Chinese both have a ridiculous amount of tones (from a Western perspective). From the paper: Language Syllable Set Weighted Syllabic Complexity English 7,931 2.48 French 5,646 2.21 German 4,207 2.68 Italian 2,719 2.30 Japanese 416 1.93 Mandarin 1,191 3.58 Spanish 1,593 2.4 English gets the density from a huge syllable set and an average syllabic complexity. Mandarin has a fairly small set but high complexity. From my experience with Japanese, it seems like it has evolved to compensate for the low density: A lot of the pronouns (I/he/she) tend to be dropped and assumed from context Some verb forms take the place of longer phrases: taberu koto ga dekimasu->taberaremasu In spoken/casual usage, many phrases are shortened: oiteoite -> oitoite, my personal favorites are the arigato gozaimasu-> mumble-zaimasu or the irrashaimase->mumble-mase
      - minikomi 15y ago
        Oitoite comes from oite oku I believe. To put, and leave something in place.
        narism 15y ago
        Yeah, maybe not the best example because it's sort of a repetition of oku, meaning put it there (implied:so I can do something with it in the future). It just stuck in my head because I had heard it conversationally before I learned it in class and had a ding lightbulb moment. Maybe a better example of ~teoite->~toite shortening is aketeoite (proper, 6 syllables), meaning open it (for some future purpose) -> aketoite (spoken/casual, 5 syllables)?
jinushaun 15y ago
This article pretty much confirms a suspicion of mine that I've had for a while: strongly syllabic languages like Spanish, Japanese and Tagalog, with their paltry use of consonant clusters, speak/sound faster because (1) scarcity of consonant clusters without tones means that words require more syllables to be uniquely identifiable, and (2) sounds flow more easily when there is a vowel between every consonant. Unlike a language like German, you're not always stopping your speech to enunciate adjacent consonants. Therefore, longer words + easier to pronounce = fast speech.
- LeafStorm 15y ago
  I pretty much arrived at the same conclusion when trying to translate various songs into Spanish. You can say sentences normally in about the same amount of time, but you can't fit Spanish versions of an English phrase in the same meter...generally you have to fudge it, and even then it doesn't always work.
- minikomi 15y ago
  Slightly related - twitter is much more verbose in Japanese purely due to the fact that 140 chars can pack in a lot more information than in English
  - makthrow 15y ago
    Same with Korean and Chinese.
  - asymmetric 15y ago
    didn't the study state just the contrary: that english is more dense than japanese?
    - e2daipi 15y ago
      This study was about syllables, not characters vs symbols. Example: Japanese for mouth 口 = 1 "character" English = 5 charachters The syllables are irrelevant, though above they match; twitter care about characters. Also note the: > "Slightly related"
swah 15y ago
I was thinking of Java & Lua.
- void-star 15y ago
  Seriously, though. Has anybody done a similar information density study on programming languages?
  - _mhp_ 15y ago
    Isn't that one of the arguments in favour of Lisp and similar languages? That the information density is so much more conducive to writing expressive code that is still sufficiently concise to keep in your head whilst writing it?
  - Raphael 15y ago
    It's pretty easy. Just count the characters, or lines. You can play a game to make the shortest code, golf.
iskander 15y ago
Original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pellegrino-et-al.pdf http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pell...
- beefman 15y ago
  I could be misglancing this at 1 am, but it looks like a bit of pomp to me. The only data they have are the lengths of the translations (in syllables) and how long it took to read them. The "information density" is just a fancy way to report the former, and they only reveal the latter through the rates. It seems they simply observed that 1. translations differ in length but 2. are read in about the same amount of time. Alas, talk of "information density" had me hopeful they applied a protocol like Shannon's to the spoken domain. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf
lysium 15y ago
Hm, .91 'information per syllable' for English at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second are 5.6 'information' per second vs. .49 * 7.84 = 3.8 for Spanish. How is 5.6 "more or less identical amount of information" as 3.8? That's a 47% difference!
- sophacles 15y ago
  Just from the information available in the time article, and from a tiny bit of thinking, I presume there are 2 things going on here: First the article claims that 1 is set arbitrarily to Vietnamese for the value of information density. There are many common ways to normalize measurements, it is obviously not 1/SPSvietnamese for this case. There are most likely other considered factors in the information density calculation (whose unit we don't actually know btw... but it is presented as a ratio otherwise they wouldn't normalize to 1), or they could just be doing some other statistical funging. Second: With a little bit of thinking you could realize that you aren't getting a good scientifically sound write-up from the Time article -- mostly because this is how they present things (consumable for the masses!). The article writer could be picking completely arbitrary measures as important for people to puzzle over and say "Wow!" at and ignoring the real results. It has happened countless times in the past and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Basically what I am saying: if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first.
  - lysium 15y ago
    > if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first Didn't I just do that? You seem to assume I am incredulous about the paper whereas I commented on the article.
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      Putting some thought into it. I think you multiply not add information density, but there are also limits on how complex a message you can decode. Consider the information density of each sylible is also limited by the grammer used. 1 cm left 4 cm up If you drop '4 cm up' you go from a 2D to a 1D but replace up with blue does not mean anything.
djtumolo 15y ago
Does anyone else get really annoyed with the interjections about other articles I should read on Time? Reminds me of those Bing commercials.
cageface 15y ago
I've been living in Vietnam and trying to learn the language for a while now and this confirms my impression that Vietnamese is very information dense. Most words are monosyllabic and the same syllable pronounced with different tones has completely different meanings. Also, a lot of things we state explicitly in English are left implicit in Vietnamese. You'd expect that a language with greater information density would lead to higher rates of transmission error but people here don't seem to have any more trouble understanding each other on the phone or in noisy environments than we do in English.
- vacri 15y ago
  British English uses a hell of a lot of implicit meanings, though this is declining with the rise of both modern soundbite politics forcing public discourse to be more literal, which also combines with public discourse being less implicit to benefit a more multicultural society. Nuance takes a long time to learn, and it's easy to take things the wrong way if you don't have heavy experience with it. I don't speak Vietnamese, so can't comment directly with that, but I can relate to my experiences in watching public Australian English simplify massively over the past 20 years or so. The wider public take a lot of cues from the media. Soundbite journalism be damned.
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    Can you give some examples of implied meanings in British/Australian English? As an native American English speaker, I've never had this opinion of British/Australian English. I mean, I do feel that Americans are more straightforward, whereas the British are rather reticent. But I don't think this is extensively reflected via linguistic differences.
    - vacri 15y ago
      It's difficult to come up with examples off the cuff, because, you know, it's implied. hrm a classic example of implied (but not really) is cockney rhyming slang ... but really it's about reading between the lines. I can recall the point when I realised that the 'old way' of implied speech was dead in public discourse with this article http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty_pool.html http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty... It's not going to make a lot of sense out of context. In context, it was an article that came out when a superstar athlete in swimming, a national hero, announced his retirement, and the media pundits were basically of the opinion that he was somehow being a traitor to Australia. This article is lampooning the slavering media, not the athlete. To someone brought up with classic Australian English (similar in nuance to British), it's blisteringly obvious what this article is getting at by halfway through the second sentence. As in, 'it's not worth pointing out' obvious. I thought the article was tedious and waaaaay too long, but the premise was funny. What was scary was that only about 10% of the people commenting understood what the article was about - the rest completely missed the point, thinking that this was another article calling the athlete a traitor, and rushing to his defense. The article was actually saying "leave the athlete alone, damn the media are reactionary idiots". Like I said, you'll read it now and it'll probably seem more obvious out of context. Examples are kind of hard to come up with off the cuff, so what other examples... When we first started watching 30 Rock, we were fairly puzzled and joked that "surely this doesn't have American writers" due to the high amount of innuendo and unpsoken communication in it; jokes that are woven into discourse without having to be focused on and made obvious. Compare to the more frequent style of US TV, my classic example of a Friends episode where the joke is "Books are so expensive, if only there was a place you could borrow them, and give them back when you're finished!", which gets a dirty look from character B. Joke made, move on. Nope, character B has to say "There is, it's called a library". That kind of punchline being eviscerated from a joke and laid out on a plate is anaethema to British comedy. I also find it more difficult to speak in metaphor with an American audience, who usually take a much more literal interpretation of what's being said (of course, it varies considerably among Americans - New Englanders seem to understand this kind of speech much more easily). I do agree that British English speakers are more reticent, but in something of a different way. I spent three months going coast to coast in the US and one thing I loved about it was that Americans just talk to strangers in a way you don't get in other English-speaking countries. Random people walking in the same direction or on the same public bus would just start talking and you'd end up with a good conversation out of it. That rarely happens here. I've probably waffled on enough at this point (I'm a little drunk), so perhaps best leave it there :) NOTE: I hate the way HN expires internal links. What, am I going to maliciously link to this reply page? Just because the above took a while to write in this little box shouldn't mean I should run the risk of having to lose a comment I spent some time on. Luckily this time I had it in pageback, but I've lost other comments on other browsers. The point of proscribing pondered (perhaps ponderous?) positations is perfectly puzzling, I put forth. Pshaw!
EREFUNDO 15y ago
Actually English has very few syllables compared to Filipino or Spanish. Nearly a third of the words are one syllable and most of the multiple syllable words have either Latin, French, or Greek origin. I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication. Then as our thoughts became more complex they either changed the tone of the syllable (as in Chinese) or added prefixes and suffixes to alter the meaning of the root word. Those language families that decided to add prefixes and suffixes became known as "inflectional" languages. Those that remained mono-syllabic have a variety of tones per syllable.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  As an aside, Greek is way more verbose than English, (hence all the multisyllabic words). It's hard to translate UIs to Greek because nothing fits.
- vorg 15y ago
  > I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract: '''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''
wisty 15y ago
From what I can tell, Chinese will often drop tones, just as English will drop vowels (substituting most vowels for a schwa - a kind of "e" or "uh" sound) if the meaning is not too ambiguous. People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounce tones correctly. IMO, getting the vowels and consonants right is harder (and more important). Seriously, here's the pairs you will confuse: d / t - d is unaspirated j / zh - j is a "cjsch" sound (a bit like "Asia") while zh is a "j" sound q / ch - q is a "bright" (slightly whistled?) ch; ch is a "dark" ch) x / sh - x is a "bright" sh and sh is a "dark" sh c / s - c is a "ts", s is just s b / p - b can sound a little closer to p than in English and p is more aspirated g / k - g sounds a little close to k, while k is more aspirated Then there's the vowels, which are really hard. Learning four tones is comparatively easy. If you don't get the consonants almost 100% correct, people will simply not be able to tell what you are saying. If you don't use tones, they can usually understand, as long as you use simple words (which face it, you will).
- smugengineer69 15y ago
  This is completely wrong...Do not listen to this person. I have studied Chinese my entire life and I can assure you, tones are extremely important. Tones are not "dropped", even in fast speech. The problem is actually that the above poster cannot hear them. This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors: 1) the general poor quality of western Mandarin education, which allows foreigners to get by without properly learning tones because teachers are too nice to say anything about it, 2) The idea that Mandarin and English are massively and irreconcilably different has led to general ignorance about the language, which in turn leads to amateur-level hacks becoming "experts" by merely knowing more than the absolute minimum about the language, and 3) general politeness shown to foreigners in large Chinese tourist destinations. Once you get beyond novelty party Chinese, you realize that to be properly understood it is absolutely imperative that your tones are correct. Or, barring that, that you make an effort. And even then it requires greater effort from the hearer to run through the often massive number of possibilities to find the correct utterance. Please, if you are considering learning Mandarin, don't listen to anyone who tells you that tones do not matter. The above post betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the language is spoken.
mootothemax 15y ago
I'd also like to know about reading speed; I'm convinced that subtitles in Polish are displayed for mere microseconds, and the same rapid-fire display is true for various dot-matrix-type signs.
- morganls 15y ago
  Don't know about polish, but lots of studies discuss this with chinese vs. english. One example: http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/ "The reading rates were about 385 equivalent words per minute for Chinese and 380 words per minute for English for the same scientific textual material (Table 1)" Probably worth digging more to see if the consensus has changed since then. That one was also done with scientific reading material, so might have limited applicability.
willf 15y ago
Here's a regression graph of Information Density vs Syllable Speed based on data from the preprint. https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FdvfurXu https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter...
awongh 15y ago
The interesting thing this article seems to suggest is that languages and speaking styles naturally seems to self-correct to provide the same amount of information, i.e, as density goes down, speed goes up- the ratio is essentially always the same. I'd be interested to see a larger sample of languages, that is, is there a language in which the decrease of either density or speed isn't combined with an increase of the other. (or the opposite) Or are humans all naturally predisposed to generate/accept information at a similar rate?

110 points by metellus 15y ago

I would have thought it is because when familiar patterns of syllables are heard we tend to concentrate more on context and meaning. While the other makes you concentrate more on the syllables itself.

aik 15y ago
I believe that is in line with their findings. Since Japanese has more syllables than any other tested language (where nearly every other letter is a vowel) it would make sense that a faster rate of unknown syllables flying by would result in the perception of faster speech. It's interesting that while the Japanese have such a focus on efficiency, their spoken and written language is potentially more contrary to this value than any other language out there.
- A1kmm 15y ago
  > Since Japanese has more syllables than any other tested language The article claims less information is encoded in each syllable, not more (as would be expected if more syllables were available). The Japanese syllabaric alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are larger than the roman alphabet, but the smaller alphabet doesn't mean that Japanese has more syllables than English. English syllables are written using multiple roman letters, and there are far more combinations possible than in hiragana or katakana (hiragana and katakana do allow small letters written between characters to modify the syllables represented, but even taking this into account, there are far more syllables possible when writing English). On top of this, written hiragana or katakana maps unambiguously to the spoken language, but with English, there is more than one possible pronunciation for many character sequences, and the speaker often needs to know the word and sometimes even how it fits into the sentence to know which of several possible syllables to pronounce.
  - aangjie 15y ago
    I would love to find the original paper and examine the actual measure of information they used. i have found that my mother tongue tamil which are known for the speed, has a greater range for context-sensitive interpretations compared to English.So much so that i prefer English in any communication related to work.
  - narism 15y ago
    So basically, it's bus width vs. clock rate. Although it looks like there is a natural upper bound on throughput. One thing the article doesn't mention but the paper goes into is the syllabic complexity. Vietnamese and Chinese both have a ridiculous amount of tones (from a Western perspective). From the paper: Language Syllable Set Weighted Syllabic Complexity English 7,931 2.48 French 5,646 2.21 German 4,207 2.68 Italian 2,719 2.30 Japanese 416 1.93 Mandarin 1,191 3.58 Spanish 1,593 2.4 English gets the density from a huge syllable set and an average syllabic complexity. Mandarin has a fairly small set but high complexity. From my experience with Japanese, it seems like it has evolved to compensate for the low density: A lot of the pronouns (I/he/she) tend to be dropped and assumed from context Some verb forms take the place of longer phrases: taberu koto ga dekimasu->taberaremasu In spoken/casual usage, many phrases are shortened: oiteoite -> oitoite, my personal favorites are the arigato gozaimasu-> mumble-zaimasu or the irrashaimase->mumble-mase
    - minikomi 15y ago
      Oitoite comes from oite oku I believe. To put, and leave something in place.
      - narism 15y ago
        Yeah, maybe not the best example because it's sort of a repetition of oku, meaning put it there (implied:so I can do something with it in the future). It just stuck in my head because I had heard it conversationally before I learned it in class and had a ding lightbulb moment. Maybe a better example of ~teoite->~toite shortening is aketeoite (proper, 6 syllables), meaning open it (for some future purpose) -> aketoite (spoken/casual, 5 syllables)?

jinushaun 15y ago

This article pretty much confirms a suspicion of mine that I've had for a while: strongly syllabic languages like Spanish, Japanese and Tagalog, with their paltry use of consonant clusters, speak/sound faster because (1) scarcity of consonant clusters without tones means that words require more syllables to be uniquely identifiable, and (2) sounds flow more easily when there is a vowel between every consonant. Unlike a language like German, you're not always stopping your speech to enunciate adjacent consonants. Therefore, longer words + easier to pronounce = fast speech.

LeafStorm 15y ago
I pretty much arrived at the same conclusion when trying to translate various songs into Spanish. You can say sentences normally in about the same amount of time, but you can't fit Spanish versions of an English phrase in the same meter...generally you have to fudge it, and even then it doesn't always work.
minikomi 15y ago
Slightly related - twitter is much more verbose in Japanese purely due to the fact that 140 chars can pack in a lot more information than in English
- makthrow 15y ago
  Same with Korean and Chinese.
- asymmetric 15y ago
  didn't the study state just the contrary: that english is more dense than japanese?
  - e2daipi 15y ago
    This study was about syllables, not characters vs symbols. Example: Japanese for mouth 口 = 1 "character" English = 5 charachters The syllables are irrelevant, though above they match; twitter care about characters. Also note the: > "Slightly related"

swah 15y ago

I was thinking of Java & Lua.

void-star 15y ago
Seriously, though. Has anybody done a similar information density study on programming languages?
- _mhp_ 15y ago
  Isn't that one of the arguments in favour of Lisp and similar languages? That the information density is so much more conducive to writing expressive code that is still sufficiently concise to keep in your head whilst writing it?
- Raphael 15y ago
  It's pretty easy. Just count the characters, or lines. You can play a game to make the shortest code, golf.

iskander 15y ago

Original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pellegrino-et-al.pdf http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pell...

beefman 15y ago
I could be misglancing this at 1 am, but it looks like a bit of pomp to me. The only data they have are the lengths of the translations (in syllables) and how long it took to read them. The "information density" is just a fancy way to report the former, and they only reveal the latter through the rates. It seems they simply observed that 1. translations differ in length but 2. are read in about the same amount of time. Alas, talk of "information density" had me hopeful they applied a protocol like Shannon's to the spoken domain. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf

lysium 15y ago

Hm, .91 'information per syllable' for English at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second are 5.6 'information' per second vs. .49 * 7.84 = 3.8 for Spanish. How is 5.6 "more or less identical amount of information" as 3.8? That's a 47% difference!

sophacles 15y ago
Just from the information available in the time article, and from a tiny bit of thinking, I presume there are 2 things going on here: First the article claims that 1 is set arbitrarily to Vietnamese for the value of information density. There are many common ways to normalize measurements, it is obviously not 1/SPSvietnamese for this case. There are most likely other considered factors in the information density calculation (whose unit we don't actually know btw... but it is presented as a ratio otherwise they wouldn't normalize to 1), or they could just be doing some other statistical funging. Second: With a little bit of thinking you could realize that you aren't getting a good scientifically sound write-up from the Time article -- mostly because this is how they present things (consumable for the masses!). The article writer could be picking completely arbitrary measures as important for people to puzzle over and say "Wow!" at and ignoring the real results. It has happened countless times in the past and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Basically what I am saying: if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first.
- lysium 15y ago
  > if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first Didn't I just do that? You seem to assume I am incredulous about the paper whereas I commented on the article.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    Putting some thought into it. I think you multiply not add information density, but there are also limits on how complex a message you can decode. Consider the information density of each sylible is also limited by the grammer used. 1 cm left 4 cm up If you drop '4 cm up' you go from a 2D to a 1D but replace up with blue does not mean anything.

djtumolo 15y ago

Does anyone else get really annoyed with the interjections about other articles I should read on Time? Reminds me of those Bing commercials.

cageface 15y ago

I've been living in Vietnam and trying to learn the language for a while now and this confirms my impression that Vietnamese is very information dense. Most words are monosyllabic and the same syllable pronounced with different tones has completely different meanings. Also, a lot of things we state explicitly in English are left implicit in Vietnamese. You'd expect that a language with greater information density would lead to higher rates of transmission error but people here don't seem to have any more trouble understanding each other on the phone or in noisy environments than we do in English.

vacri 15y ago
British English uses a hell of a lot of implicit meanings, though this is declining with the rise of both modern soundbite politics forcing public discourse to be more literal, which also combines with public discourse being less implicit to benefit a more multicultural society. Nuance takes a long time to learn, and it's easy to take things the wrong way if you don't have heavy experience with it. I don't speak Vietnamese, so can't comment directly with that, but I can relate to my experiences in watching public Australian English simplify massively over the past 20 years or so. The wider public take a lot of cues from the media. Soundbite journalism be damned.
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  Can you give some examples of implied meanings in British/Australian English? As an native American English speaker, I've never had this opinion of British/Australian English. I mean, I do feel that Americans are more straightforward, whereas the British are rather reticent. But I don't think this is extensively reflected via linguistic differences.
  - vacri 15y ago
    It's difficult to come up with examples off the cuff, because, you know, it's implied. hrm a classic example of implied (but not really) is cockney rhyming slang ... but really it's about reading between the lines. I can recall the point when I realised that the 'old way' of implied speech was dead in public discourse with this article http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty_pool.html http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty... It's not going to make a lot of sense out of context. In context, it was an article that came out when a superstar athlete in swimming, a national hero, announced his retirement, and the media pundits were basically of the opinion that he was somehow being a traitor to Australia. This article is lampooning the slavering media, not the athlete. To someone brought up with classic Australian English (similar in nuance to British), it's blisteringly obvious what this article is getting at by halfway through the second sentence. As in, 'it's not worth pointing out' obvious. I thought the article was tedious and waaaaay too long, but the premise was funny. What was scary was that only about 10% of the people commenting understood what the article was about - the rest completely missed the point, thinking that this was another article calling the athlete a traitor, and rushing to his defense. The article was actually saying "leave the athlete alone, damn the media are reactionary idiots". Like I said, you'll read it now and it'll probably seem more obvious out of context. Examples are kind of hard to come up with off the cuff, so what other examples... When we first started watching 30 Rock, we were fairly puzzled and joked that "surely this doesn't have American writers" due to the high amount of innuendo and unpsoken communication in it; jokes that are woven into discourse without having to be focused on and made obvious. Compare to the more frequent style of US TV, my classic example of a Friends episode where the joke is "Books are so expensive, if only there was a place you could borrow them, and give them back when you're finished!", which gets a dirty look from character B. Joke made, move on. Nope, character B has to say "There is, it's called a library". That kind of punchline being eviscerated from a joke and laid out on a plate is anaethema to British comedy. I also find it more difficult to speak in metaphor with an American audience, who usually take a much more literal interpretation of what's being said (of course, it varies considerably among Americans - New Englanders seem to understand this kind of speech much more easily). I do agree that British English speakers are more reticent, but in something of a different way. I spent three months going coast to coast in the US and one thing I loved about it was that Americans just talk to strangers in a way you don't get in other English-speaking countries. Random people walking in the same direction or on the same public bus would just start talking and you'd end up with a good conversation out of it. That rarely happens here. I've probably waffled on enough at this point (I'm a little drunk), so perhaps best leave it there :) NOTE: I hate the way HN expires internal links. What, am I going to maliciously link to this reply page? Just because the above took a while to write in this little box shouldn't mean I should run the risk of having to lose a comment I spent some time on. Luckily this time I had it in pageback, but I've lost other comments on other browsers. The point of proscribing pondered (perhaps ponderous?) positations is perfectly puzzling, I put forth. Pshaw!

EREFUNDO 15y ago

Actually English has very few syllables compared to Filipino or Spanish. Nearly a third of the words are one syllable and most of the multiple syllable words have either Latin, French, or Greek origin. I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication. Then as our thoughts became more complex they either changed the tone of the syllable (as in Chinese) or added prefixes and suffixes to alter the meaning of the root word. Those language families that decided to add prefixes and suffixes became known as "inflectional" languages. Those that remained mono-syllabic have a variety of tones per syllable.

StavrosK 15y ago
As an aside, Greek is way more verbose than English, (hence all the multisyllabic words). It's hard to translate UIs to Greek because nothing fits.
vorg 15y ago
> I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract: '''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''

wisty 15y ago

From what I can tell, Chinese will often drop tones, just as English will drop vowels (substituting most vowels for a schwa - a kind of "e" or "uh" sound) if the meaning is not too ambiguous. People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounce tones correctly. IMO, getting the vowels and consonants right is harder (and more important). Seriously, here's the pairs you will confuse: d / t - d is unaspirated j / zh - j is a "cjsch" sound (a bit like "Asia") while zh is a "j" sound q / ch - q is a "bright" (slightly whistled?) ch; ch is a "dark" ch) x / sh - x is a "bright" sh and sh is a "dark" sh c / s - c is a "ts", s is just s b / p - b can sound a little closer to p than in English and p is more aspirated g / k - g sounds a little close to k, while k is more aspirated Then there's the vowels, which are really hard. Learning four tones is comparatively easy. If you don't get the consonants almost 100% correct, people will simply not be able to tell what you are saying. If you don't use tones, they can usually understand, as long as you use simple words (which face it, you will).

smugengineer69 15y ago
This is completely wrong...Do not listen to this person. I have studied Chinese my entire life and I can assure you, tones are extremely important. Tones are not "dropped", even in fast speech. The problem is actually that the above poster cannot hear them. This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors: 1) the general poor quality of western Mandarin education, which allows foreigners to get by without properly learning tones because teachers are too nice to say anything about it, 2) The idea that Mandarin and English are massively and irreconcilably different has led to general ignorance about the language, which in turn leads to amateur-level hacks becoming "experts" by merely knowing more than the absolute minimum about the language, and 3) general politeness shown to foreigners in large Chinese tourist destinations. Once you get beyond novelty party Chinese, you realize that to be properly understood it is absolutely imperative that your tones are correct. Or, barring that, that you make an effort. And even then it requires greater effort from the hearer to run through the often massive number of possibilities to find the correct utterance. Please, if you are considering learning Mandarin, don't listen to anyone who tells you that tones do not matter. The above post betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the language is spoken.

mootothemax 15y ago

I'd also like to know about reading speed; I'm convinced that subtitles in Polish are displayed for mere microseconds, and the same rapid-fire display is true for various dot-matrix-type signs.

morganls 15y ago
Don't know about polish, but lots of studies discuss this with chinese vs. english. One example: http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/ "The reading rates were about 385 equivalent words per minute for Chinese and 380 words per minute for English for the same scientific textual material (Table 1)" Probably worth digging more to see if the consensus has changed since then. That one was also done with scientific reading material, so might have limited applicability.

willf 15y ago

Here's a regression graph of Information Density vs Syllable Speed based on data from the preprint. https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FdvfurXu https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter...

awongh 15y ago

The interesting thing this article seems to suggest is that languages and speaking styles naturally seems to self-correct to provide the same amount of information, i.e, as density goes down, speed goes up- the ratio is essentially always the same. I'd be interested to see a larger sample of languages, that is, is there a language in which the decrease of either density or speed isn't combined with an increase of the other. (or the opposite) Or are humans all naturally predisposed to generate/accept information at a similar rate?