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The article makes a claim about Han script information density relative to measures of length. It makes no claim about how the Han script achieves it. If you c
by hsivonen 7y ago
The article makes a claim about Han script information density relative to measures of length. It makes no claim about how the Han script achieves it.
If you consider this from the perspective of Huffman coding, it shouldn't be surprising that the script that gets the most code space in Unicode would carry the most information per symbol on average.
- ncmncm 7y agoThe point is that if they really were logographs, and not just a complicated syllabary, you would get a lot more than the equivalent of two or three letters out of them.
- nneonneo 7y agoYour math is wrong. The Chinese (Traditional) translation consists of 2202 characters (UTF-32). The English translation consists of 8555 characters. This amounts to ~3.88 English letters per Chinese character, quite a bit more than "two or three". None of the actual syllabaries get even close to the density of Chinese. Korean, the closest comparison point (a true syllabary) clocks in at 3856 characters - a far cry from 2202.
- hsivonen 7y agoYou are arguing with something that the article did not say. The substring "logo" does not occur in the article. The article makes no claim about what the Han script encodes beyond implying that the Han script isn't alphabetic, which shouldn't be controversial.