6 ms·

They were saying each is tolerant of loss.

by zerb 8y ago

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I don't know what that means.
- zerb 8y ago
  The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example. I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is. All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.
    - zerb 8y ago
      The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.
    - Zarel 8y ago
      I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English. Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English. Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents. Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down). It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        > Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English. That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.] That just means in modern English vowel length isn't distinctive, but it is in Japanese. English on the other hand has a distinction between /r/ and /l/ that Japanese doesn't ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_... ). In other languages (like Tamil), voicing distinctions in stops aren't phonemic (so 'log' and 'lock' would be non-distinct). And so on. If as a non-native English speaker you produced 'rog' when your intended meaning was "lock", people would stare at you in confusion too.
- toufka 8y ago
  In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary. This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well). And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    I find that a somewhat odd evaluation. English is comparatively intolerant of changes in word order compared to a lot of languages.
    - toufka 8y ago
      For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken. "I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.
      - zerb 8y ago
        But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.

They were saying each is tolerant of loss.

by zerb 8y ago

They were saying each is tolerant of loss.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

I don't know what that means.

zerb 8y ago
The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example. I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is. All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.
  - zerb 8y ago
    The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.
  - Zarel 8y ago
    I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English. Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English. Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents. Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down). It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      > Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English. That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.] That just means in modern English vowel length isn't distinctive, but it is in Japanese. English on the other hand has a distinction between /r/ and /l/ that Japanese doesn't ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_... ). In other languages (like Tamil), voicing distinctions in stops aren't phonemic (so 'log' and 'lock' would be non-distinct). And so on. If as a non-native English speaker you produced 'rog' when your intended meaning was "lock", people would stare at you in confusion too.
toufka 8y ago
In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary. This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well). And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  I find that a somewhat odd evaluation. English is comparatively intolerant of changes in word order compared to a lot of languages.
  - toufka 8y ago
    For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken. "I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.
    - zerb 8y ago
      But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.