Just read the full article. It's no good. Analyzing ASL in terms of hand shapes only, on the grounds that they're the only feature that all linguists looking

Just read the full article. It's no good. Analyzing ASL in terms of hand shapes only, on the grounds that they're the only feature that all linguists looking at ASL seem to agree on is really problematic. Computation of entropy is heavily dependent on the alphabet. If you say english has an alphabet at the syllable level, you'll get a very different amount of entropy than if you say the alphabet is phoneme level. If you go a level below phonemes and look at distinctive features (voiced/unvoiced, aspriated/unaspriated, front/back, high/low, ...) you'll get yet another entropy number altogether. These numbers will be wildly different from each other. Entropy calculations between languages must use comparably derived alphabets which cover the whole communication channel, or they will be meaningless. Argh. Junky article.