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I know this is tangential to the whole thing, but this is a cool feature of the Chinese language: >The story has been incredibly popular across Chinese social

I know this is tangential to the whole thing, but this is a cool feature of the Chinese language: >The story has been incredibly popular across Chinese social networks with more than 600 million people reading posts that use a hashtag which translates to "female vlogger experiences bug showing her old lady face" and more than 50,000 using the hashtag itself. In english, you're never going to get a twitter trend of #FemaleVloggerExperiencesBugShowingHerOldLadyFace. Does anyone know of research looking at how more compact languages influence trending? It seems neat.

newen 7y ago
Good chance it's actually just 6 to 7 syllables long. So, not just writing but compact speech too.
- kremonte 7y ago
  Important to note, however, that spoken language information density (per syllable) and syllabic rate are strongly inversely correlated [1]; languages such as Mandarin with lots of information contained in each syllable tend to be spoken slower than languages like Spanish, which uses many more syllables to convey the same amount of information, but in a similar amount of time. So, the compactness really is more just on the writing side. [1] "A cross-language perspective on speech information rate" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16e6/43a9e39674c58acd7cdf56c0ff4478492f63.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16e6/43a9e39674c58acd7cdf56...
- yorwba 7y ago
  It's #女主播直播出bug秒变大妈脸# [1]. 12 syllables. I can get an English translation down to the same syllable count: #StreamingBugTurnsVloggerGirlIntoOldWoman It obviously still takes up more horizontal space; to fix that you'd need to use a font that squeezes about 3 Latin letters into the same space as one Chinese character. However, the gap in information density isn't actually that large, because Chinese usually requires slightly larger fonts to achieve the same legibility. It's maybe also interesting to note that hashtags are delimited by # on both ends, because there are no spaces between words you could use to find the end. [1] https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23%E5%A5%B3%E4%B8%BB%E6%92%AD%E7%9B%B4%E6%92%AD%E5%87%BAbug%E7%A7%92%E5%8F%98%E5%A4%A7%E5%A6%88%E8%84%B8%23 https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1...
  - newen 7y ago
    Interesting. I never would have thought a hashtag that long would gain so much popularity but there you go. It must take a long time to type too.
  - comex 7y ago
    Hmm... You could save another syllable by changing StreamingBug to StreamGlitch, which is also more idiomatic. Same number of characters though.
  - darkerside 7y ago
    #OopsVlogetteShowsHagFace
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Do you have any idea whether this is an atypical length for a trending hashtag in chinese?
MivLives 7y ago
Not about tags but I remember a lot of discussion around this concept the difference between Japanese and English twitter when the character limit was changed. This short blog links to a more academic source. http://www.scotthale.net/blog/?p=628 http://www.scotthale.net/blog/?p=628
toyg 7y ago
It would have simply become something more compact, like #filterfail. We never got #CelebritiesPhonePicsHacked, but rather #fappening. Similarly, “Watergate” went from a location name to mean “never-ending scandal involving public figures”. Language compression does not require ideograms.

newen 7y ago

Good chance it's actually just 6 to 7 syllables long. So, not just writing but compact speech too.

kremonte 7y ago
Important to note, however, that spoken language information density (per syllable) and syllabic rate are strongly inversely correlated [1]; languages such as Mandarin with lots of information contained in each syllable tend to be spoken slower than languages like Spanish, which uses many more syllables to convey the same amount of information, but in a similar amount of time. So, the compactness really is more just on the writing side. [1] "A cross-language perspective on speech information rate" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16e6/43a9e39674c58acd7cdf56c0ff4478492f63.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16e6/43a9e39674c58acd7cdf56...
yorwba 7y ago
It's #女主播直播出bug秒变大妈脸# [1]. 12 syllables. I can get an English translation down to the same syllable count: #StreamingBugTurnsVloggerGirlIntoOldWoman It obviously still takes up more horizontal space; to fix that you'd need to use a font that squeezes about 3 Latin letters into the same space as one Chinese character. However, the gap in information density isn't actually that large, because Chinese usually requires slightly larger fonts to achieve the same legibility. It's maybe also interesting to note that hashtags are delimited by # on both ends, because there are no spaces between words you could use to find the end. [1] https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23%E5%A5%B3%E4%B8%BB%E6%92%AD%E7%9B%B4%E6%92%AD%E5%87%BAbug%E7%A7%92%E5%8F%98%E5%A4%A7%E5%A6%88%E8%84%B8%23 https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1...
- newen 7y ago
  Interesting. I never would have thought a hashtag that long would gain so much popularity but there you go. It must take a long time to type too.
- comex 7y ago
  Hmm... You could save another syllable by changing StreamingBug to StreamGlitch, which is also more idiomatic. Same number of characters though.
- darkerside 7y ago
  #OopsVlogetteShowsHagFace
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Do you have any idea whether this is an atypical length for a trending hashtag in chinese?

MivLives 7y ago

Not about tags but I remember a lot of discussion around this concept the difference between Japanese and English twitter when the character limit was changed. This short blog links to a more academic source. http://www.scotthale.net/blog/?p=628 http://www.scotthale.net/blog/?p=628

toyg 7y ago

It would have simply become something more compact, like #filterfail. We never got #CelebritiesPhonePicsHacked, but rather #fappening. Similarly, “Watergate” went from a location name to mean “never-ending scandal involving public figures”. Language compression does not require ideograms.