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> The characters are intricate, but I don't know what the information density is (pixels per word); I think they have fewer charaters per idea in Japanese, and
by micampe 11y ago
> The characters are intricate, but I don't know what the information density is (pixels per word); I think they have fewer charaters per idea in Japanese, and more essential pixels per character.
Interestingly, that appears to not be the case for Japanese, quite the opposite in fact. There was a research a while ago about the speed of spoken language that I think can loosely be applied here (number of characters per syllable depends on which Japanese alphabet is being used). The research concluded that Japanese is very low density (and thus spoken very fast).
http://kottke.org/11/09/the-speed-and-density-of-language http://kottke.org/11/09/the-speed-and-density-of-language
- thaumasiotes 11y agoAs to spoken Japanese, this isn't hard to conclude from first principles, since the phonological structure of Japanese is quite spare. As few syllables are possible, the informational content per syllable is low. (related: I read a book containing an example intended to address the idea that Japanese is spoken faster than English -- an English sentence of six notional syllables such as "Smith's strength crushed six sleek ships" is going to take much longer to say than one such as "I made an apple pie", which is also six syllables. The second sentence has one consonant per syllable (on average), the first has considerably more. In Japanese, only the second kind is possible.) The Japanese syllabary characters tend to be quite modestly formed; they have few essential pixels per character. The kanji, which carry large quantities of semantic information, require much more space to be legible.