Wollen sie etwa behaupten, die Informationsübermittlungsgeschwindigkeit der deutschen Sprache sei unterdurchschnittlich? So eine Unverschämtheit!
It’s long been suspected that Koreans are really fast with rhythm games and have high APM because of their language getting to the point faster.
Italian has a wildly different set than everyone else pretty much.
So if I’m reading this right, French (closely followed by English) tends to convey the most info per unit time?
I think i read a study long ago, about the speed of transmiting information being faster in languagues of great empires. Sounds logical to me and matches English, French, Chinese.
Yes but they also utilize smell.
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.
Written French is slow (needs more words )
Spoken French IS faster
spoiler
as a fr*nch 🤢
Spoiler didnt work ;)
Spoiler worked perfectly 🤮
I always thought that English was an efficient language.
Switch to Rust. I speak Rust btw.
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
Spanish and Japanese use the same sounds. For the most part, anyway; there are probably a few exceptions. This was unexpected and utterly blew my mind as a native Spanish speaker when I took Japanese lessons.
Take the longest, most complicated Japanese word. Write it out in romaji (Latin letters). And ask a native Spanish speaker to pronounce it. One who knows nothing of Japanese. They’ll pronounce it pretty much correctly. I was fascinated.
I recently had a conversation with a native Spanish speaker who lived in Japan and spoke Japanese fairly fluently. He said the exact same thing, it was surprising how similar they can be in this regard
What produces the stretched graphs like Italian and German? What do these humps mean?
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.
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.
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.
Cowards left out Navajo.
The graph is missing languages such as Portuguese and Arabic.
Thai is so efficient
Opposite. Look at the notes at the top of the graphs
Oh wait yeah you’re right.
It’s the fastest, but the least efficient actually!
It’s the slowest in speech and the one that conveys information the slowest too.
I’m so dumb. 😅
Not as efficient as others in bits per second, but interestingly the syllable-to-bits ratio is tightly coupled.
Hard to tell. Need something like “bits of information per syllable” to get at efficiency. Just eyeballing it, Vietnamese, English, and Cantonese seem most likely the most efficient.
Cantonese and Vietnamese make sense, as they’re are both tonal languages (along with Mandarin, Thai, Punjabi, and Cherokee apparently). English wastes tones on communicating stress or question vs statement.
As someone who speaks both French and English, I’m surprised to see French as leading “information density” language. Most French terms have been incorporated into English. Language tends to be behind on technology terms. Language doesn’t have any noticeable difference in short syllable common words to English. It also seems to me that French speakers have an easier time in being vague. I have the impression that English is more precise.
Looking at the two curves, it looks like they are pretty close but French edges out English because of the speed it’s spoken at.
Even when it was fresh in my mind, I was never able to follow French tv because they just go so fast.
Yeah like “qu’est-ce que c’est ?” Which is just “what’s that?” (I speak both too) would never have guessed French had more information encoded, french translations are always longer too (but you don’t always pronounce all ofc).
I think this moreso demonstrates how tedious written french is. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” is significantly faster to say than “what’s that?”
I’d wager if the chart was on information density per written letter or word french would be way further behind
I’d say it’s more equal in time used, but otherwise spot on 😁
In most cases, being vague requires more informational transfer. To be vague but still connected to whatever is the signified, you need to give more information around the idea rather than simply stating the idea. Think about being vague about how you feel versus being blunt about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s a similar story for Swedish and German for example. Not exactly the same as Finnish, but the whole mashing words together for them to make better sense. I’m starting to think that English is the odd one out.
One example could be “kommunikationsdepartementssekretariatsanteckningar” (communication department secretary’s notes). But an English example would be where Swedish, German, I guess Finnish, would say “blackboard” instead of “black board” to remove the ambiguity while English mostly does the latter.
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.
Is that a common question to be asked in Finland?
Depends on how good drugs you’ve got
Poor Thai down there at the bottom, speaking slowly and transferring information slowly.
Thai, the PNY USB stick of languages, apparently.
LMFAO PNY USB that’s poetic
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).
