5 ms·

> That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible. YMMV, but for German (I'm not a native speake

by mziel 11y ago

> That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible. YMMV, but for German (I'm not a native speaker, although fluent) you can't figure out the meaning of the sentence until the very end. The authors' even acknowledge this: >German, which has some notoriously indirect sentence constructions, is far less optimized, according to the analysis. >And the researchers also discovered that “head-final” languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Turkish, where the head word comes last, show less length minimization than is typical. German, Japanese, Turkish seem like quite a big chunk of languages (population-wise), so I wonder if initial statements are not too English-specific.

ocb 11y ago
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." - Mark Twain
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
davidw 11y ago
Yeah, after reading a bit, I started searching for 'German' to see what they said about it. I'm completely in agreement with Mark Twain's assessment of that language. From the article: "among languages. Italian appears to be highly optimized for short sentences" - oddly, though, a lot of more 'literary' Italian tends to long, florid phrases that I would consider run-ons in English. "Rhetoric" has been a thing there for thousands of years, after all, after they borrowed it from the Greeks.
- qubex 11y ago
  As an Anglo-Italian bilingual speaker, I also wish to add that (compared to my only other native reference, English) Italian is almost maddeningly facile on ambiguity all the way to ample latitude for double-entendres. Personally, I find that emotions are best notated in Italian, but sound thinking requires a hard-nosed tool such as English.
  - mziel 11y ago
    Something, something, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis :)
- kaybe 11y ago
  Tangentially, there are studies that state that the information rate (information per time) is about the same in all languages, and languages with lower information density per word are spoken slower.
  - mziel 11y ago
    Can you provide links? Greatly appreciated!
    - kaybe 11y ago
      E.g. here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433.3226&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433... (a lot of articles provide summaries, eg http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/) They cite three others: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Locke5/publication/5561615_Cost_and_complexity_selection_for_speech_and_language/links/09e415100f89672b74000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Locke5/publication/... http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng/2000/PDF/UninvitedGuest.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng/2000/PDF/UninvitedGue... I can't find access to the third one without digging since it's published in conference proceedings from 1961, but there's a talk with access (wow!): http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/history/snds/Karlgren.mp3 http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/history/snds/Karlgren.... Further citation-following yields more books I cannot get a hold of (see the citations in the papers if you want to digg).
rndn 11y ago
Gödel, Escher, Bach has a great paragraph on this in the context of recursive structures and processes (i.e. things that can be modeled with stacks, i.e. push and pop operations): Recursion in Language (p. 138): Our mental stacking power is perhaps slightly stronger in language. The grammatical structure of all languages involves setting up quite elaborate push-down stacks, though, to be sure, the difficulty of understanding a sentence increases sharply with the number of pushes onto the stack. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which Droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience out-of-order popping from the stack onto which the professor's verbs been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender. But in normal ken German, such deep stacks almost never occur-in fact, native speaker of German often unconsciously violate certain conventions which force verb to go to the end, in order to avoid the mental effort of keeping track of the stack. Every language has constructions which involve stacks, though usually of a less spectacular nature than German. But there are always of rephrasing sentences so that the depth of stacking is minimal. Here is an example of such a (grammatical) beast: Der Mechaniker, auf den wir wegen dem Unfall, den wir, bevor wir die Stadt, die im Norden liegt, erreichen konnten, hatten, gewartet haben, ist endlich angekommen. This can’t really be translated to English: The mechanist, for whom because of the accident, which, before the city, which lies in the North, we could reach, we had, we have waited for, has finally arrived.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Funny I've never `which` in programming languages, it's kinda like a short lambda or an anaphoric binder.
- to3m 11y ago
  The mechanic the accident affected is well known in the city he was late to. The people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing songs about it, in fact. The tourist guide calls them the songs the people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing. The buildings the money the tourists the songs the people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing attracts spend paid for are also a big draw.

by mziel 11y ago

ocb 11y ago

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." - Mark Twain

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

davidw 11y ago

Yeah, after reading a bit, I started searching for 'German' to see what they said about it. I'm completely in agreement with Mark Twain's assessment of that language. From the article: "among languages. Italian appears to be highly optimized for short sentences" - oddly, though, a lot of more 'literary' Italian tends to long, florid phrases that I would consider run-ons in English. "Rhetoric" has been a thing there for thousands of years, after all, after they borrowed it from the Greeks.

qubex 11y ago
As an Anglo-Italian bilingual speaker, I also wish to add that (compared to my only other native reference, English) Italian is almost maddeningly facile on ambiguity all the way to ample latitude for double-entendres. Personally, I find that emotions are best notated in Italian, but sound thinking requires a hard-nosed tool such as English.
- mziel 11y ago
  Something, something, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis :)
kaybe 11y ago
Tangentially, there are studies that state that the information rate (information per time) is about the same in all languages, and languages with lower information density per word are spoken slower.
- mziel 11y ago
  Can you provide links? Greatly appreciated!
  - kaybe 11y ago
    E.g. here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433.3226&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433... (a lot of articles provide summaries, eg http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/) They cite three others: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Locke5/publication/5561615_Cost_and_complexity_selection_for_speech_and_language/links/09e415100f89672b74000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Locke5/publication/... http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng/2000/PDF/UninvitedGuest.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng/2000/PDF/UninvitedGue... I can't find access to the third one without digging since it's published in conference proceedings from 1961, but there's a talk with access (wow!): http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/history/snds/Karlgren.mp3 http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/history/snds/Karlgren.... Further citation-following yields more books I cannot get a hold of (see the citations in the papers if you want to digg).

rndn 11y ago

Gödel, Escher, Bach has a great paragraph on this in the context of recursive structures and processes (i.e. things that can be modeled with stacks, i.e. push and pop operations): Recursion in Language (p. 138): Our mental stacking power is perhaps slightly stronger in language. The grammatical structure of all languages involves setting up quite elaborate push-down stacks, though, to be sure, the difficulty of understanding a sentence increases sharply with the number of pushes onto the stack. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which Droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience out-of-order popping from the stack onto which the professor's verbs been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender. But in normal ken German, such deep stacks almost never occur-in fact, native speaker of German often unconsciously violate certain conventions which force verb to go to the end, in order to avoid the mental effort of keeping track of the stack. Every language has constructions which involve stacks, though usually of a less spectacular nature than German. But there are always of rephrasing sentences so that the depth of stacking is minimal. Here is an example of such a (grammatical) beast: Der Mechaniker, auf den wir wegen dem Unfall, den wir, bevor wir die Stadt, die im Norden liegt, erreichen konnten, hatten, gewartet haben, ist endlich angekommen. This can’t really be translated to English: The mechanist, for whom because of the accident, which, before the city, which lies in the North, we could reach, we had, we have waited for, has finally arrived.

agumonkey 11y ago
Funny I've never `which` in programming languages, it's kinda like a short lambda or an anaphoric binder.
to3m 11y ago
The mechanic the accident affected is well known in the city he was late to. The people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing songs about it, in fact. The tourist guide calls them the songs the people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing. The buildings the money the tourists the songs the people the city the mechanic the accident affected was late to contains sing attracts spend paid for are also a big draw.