11 ms·

What's the most efficient language?

65 points by yakkomajuri 5y ago

k__ 5y ago
"Spanish from Spain ranking at 14 and Latin American Spanish landing at 32" Interesting result. I tries to learn Spanish a few years ago, and read that south american Spanish speakers were unhappy, that people from Spain would say their Spanish is the true and better one, and that Spain decide what is Spanish and what isn't. If that experiment holds true, their decisions at least led to a more efficient Spanish, haha.
- leephillips 5y ago
  The article continues: “The vast majority of differences are purely arbitrary word selections, though.” He’s not measuring a property of languages, but of particular translations of the privacy policy. By the way, sometimes North Americans encounter attitudes that UK English is in some way more authentic or better than their variety. That’s silly, too, and ahistorical. The difference with Spanish is that, like the French, they have an Academy that hands down official language judgments, and these are taken seriously by publishers, etc. The Academy is based in Spain, so they have a way to sort-of enforce their linguistic dominance. English is more anarchic.
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    It's not just the absence of an a academy resisting linguistic change, it's that the people who brought English to North America were English, so the dialects that have evolved in North America have been evolving from Old English just as long as the dialects in England. And moreover, languages don't change at a uniform rate. Until recently the center of linguistic change in the anglosphere was London, so British English, and particularly London English, was more innovative than North American dialects. I expect things have gotten more complicated since there are populous power centers outside of London now.
dvh 5y ago
Slovak language have few single-letter words: a - and i - and also (archaic) k - to, towards o - about, at s - with u - near, next to v - in, inside z - from
- forinti 5y ago
  I started learning Russian when the pandemic started, and I found it to be more concise than the other languages I'm familiar with. Many phrases omit the verb, the case system precludes the need for connecting words, and also many little words are two or more words in other languages (туда - to there, сюда - to here, etc).
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    Congratulations, you just made the distinction between synthetic and analytical languages.
    - fourtrees 5y ago
      This is more to the general readership. Well, no, he's discovered the difference between non-logographic orthographies that map spoken sound to graphemes at a close to one-to-one ratio (like Spanish or German where 'a' usually mean /a/ and those that don't, like English or Irish, assign one graph to a multitude of speech sounds. This is old news to most of you, but consider 'g' or 'sh' (which represents one phoneme). but 'g' can be alternately represent the sounds in Geronimo, good, through, gnat, tongue, and probably others I'm forgetting (ng). Plenty of other graphemes follow suit. Analytical and synthethic languages alter meaning through predominantly differeent morphosyntactic mechanisms (and then meaning and pronunciation follow) Analytic languages are like Sanskrit or Turkish. Many changes in meaning come from altering the word by a suffix or the like or by phonemic alterations like vowel harmony (we still have a little of both in English perhaps) Analytic languages like Chinese, English, or French rely on (1) altering the word order to accomplish mostly the same thing. Again, it's a spectrum, and English has its fair share of analytic features. Synthetic languages might be a bit easier to learn, but any argument for the superiority of a single synthethetic language has to account for a plethora of typological features, like pitch, morphosyntactic alignment, pronunciation, pragmatics, elisions, clitics, particles, and so forth, that must be learnt. Any argument for the superiority of them as a whole runs into trouble at least at the point where languages seems to alternate between the two extremes. To go off topic b/c its sunday and im bored: there is no strong deductive proof among linguists that words exist universally. I mean that many languages, especially the lesser-contacted ones, and especially those in North American, whose languages feature one l o n g word or two that convey the same meaning as ten in English. To a speaker of Mohawk the category 'word' has to have little use. As does syntax (but not morphology! This leads me to wonder how much the word is a written convention or limited geographically. We once assumed that there were at most three genders. Since then we've discovered languages with >7 and 0 genders (noun classes). Likewise, other languages have different parts of speech. Korean features a prominent topic-marker and a class of adjectives that occupy the the verb's position in the sentence and function like a predicate. They need that those words to make sense of communication; English speakers really don't. Is perhaps the word also a concept that some groups have need of and others do not. On to the main topic, and particularly addressing the OP. Be careful not to confuse language with the script(s) they're written in. The to do not correlate beyond giving the an archeologist the ability to tell a logographic language from an alphabet. You project is cool when looking at various scripts from around the world. Secondly, be careful to claim, even in passing that rapidity/efficiency is superior. The Japanese nobility used to take eight seconds before beginning or continuing a conversation to allow for contemplation. The Ents had a similar convetion. There are benefits to the slow and inefficient. Clarity in speech is only one example. Anyhow, an afternoon well spent.
drexlspivey 5y ago
Counting pixels in a block of text to determine information density doesn’t sound like a very robust method to me. You could get very different results depending on the font you use to render the text.
- jsnell 5y ago
  It is worse than just sensitivity to different fonts, it ends up being sensitive to totally incidental details of the glyphs. In a Latin script, all the letters carry as much information. But this metric would treat a lowercase i as much more efficient than a capital W.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    Isn't that intentional? Picking sprawling glyphs for common items, and simple ones for rare meanings would be "inefficient" in some interesting sense. Indeed 'i' is the most common letter in Latin.
  - im_dario 5y ago
    You are right but then is interesting to compare languages using Latin script. I find interesting that the first runner is Lithuanian, between non-Latin script languages, and the second is Swedish, with English coming third with quite a difference. Lithuanian has quite a heavy use of diacritic signs, but it seems to pack more information than the others. And other languages with similar diacritic signs are not close to it. Although the sensitivity to different fonts and details is real, we can draw some interesting conclusions from this Sunday exercise.
- childintime 5y ago
  English could be rendered in a 4x3 font (or even 3x3 font).. In this test it'll comfortably beat out any other language. See: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/325977/4x3_pixel https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/325977/4x3_pixel
  - timbit42 5y ago
WJW 5y ago
I wonder if Hebrew scores so high because most words leave out the vowels. There are technically annotations on the consonants about which vowel should be pronounced, but outside primary school and language schools for immigrants nobody seems to use them. Arabic has a similar setup, I'm not familiar with Gujaranti but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to have a very similar setup.
- samatman 5y ago
  glsh cld wn ths cntst hndly if we chs crflly nd use th occsnl matrs lctinis
  - linux2647 5y ago
    “English could win this contest handily if we chose carefully and use the occasional …”?
    - wolfgang42 5y ago
      My guess is “amateurish elocutionist” but I needed computer assistance: $ for t in matrs lctinis; do echo; grep '.*'$(echo $t | sed 's/./&.*/g') /usr/share/dict/words | grep -Ev "s$"; done Amaterasu amateurish amateurism humanitarianism masterstroke materialism materialist materialistic materialistically maturest metatarsal miniaturist misanthropist elocutionist For my own amusement, I also came up with another grammatically plausible “parsimonious” (inserting the fewest extra letters) interpretation: > Galosh-clad win this contest handily if we chase carefully and use the occasional mantras, elocutionist!
      - sarabande 5y ago
        This is great! As someone who immediately recognized it as 'mater lectionis' I wondered how someone unfamiliar with this aspect of Hebrew would attempt to solve the puzzle.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
willis936 5y ago
It's interesting, but flawed. Pixels don't matter, the cardinality of the set of characters does. You could replace every kanji with a minimal visual entropy version and make a "more efficient" language by the pixel complexity metric. Sure, it'd be hard to read. Information theory applied to linguistics is pretty well trodden ground. Some of the earliest applications of information theory was answering questions like this correctly. Importantly, languages do not evolve to be "maximally efficient" in the bits per second sense. They evolved to be maximally effective. You'll find that the difference between entropy and word length (written or spoken) is almost entirely spent on channel coding. When you lose characters, or parts of characters, or words, or phonemes, the meaning can be recovered. If you were running at entropy a lost character would make the entire message nonsense. Edit: the same goes for visual entropy too. The "most efficient" language is the one I just made up: where the language with the largest cardinality of words (I'll pick Kanji) has each character mapped to a unique bitmap of noise. Easier to just leave the characters as they are and let the computer do that part ;)
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Using a fixed, non-trivial passage is helpful for normalizing across languages. One wonders what the literature has to say regarding generalizing information across topics. Is it easier to convey some topics in some languages? For example, Philosophy in Greek? In our day, such inquiry may not be possible due to Political Correctness.
  - willis936 5y ago
    It is obscene to suggest political motivations for a strawman that does not exist. If you did a simple google search for "linguistics information theory" you would find that there are still studies constantly coming out. Divorce yourself from your political tribe for just one moment out of the day.
    - pfortuny 5y ago
      Hey, you are right, totally. But the tone of your reply is off. Take it easy, it is not so important.
albatrosstrophy 5y ago
I speak both a 'most efficient' language (Arabic) and a 'least efficient' (Malay). My take ia that while Arabic is a very concise language, the learning curve is really steep. Verbs has to be conjugated to accommodate pronouns as well as tense. So in order to say 'I ate', the root word akala has to be conjugated to akaltu. Sometimes the conjugation becomes so complex that it hardly looks like its root word. Malay meanwhile, while seemingly less efficient, is much more straight forward. There is no need to conjugate verbs. Instead to say 'I ate', you say saya (I) sudah (already) makan (eat). It's very accessible to beginners. I think it's also interesting to see how complex a language can get in order to become efficient. Like can you combine more than pronouns and tenses in a single word to make it more efficient.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Just like a programming language, in fact.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    Humans are mutually programming each other using homoiconic phonetic languages.
  - umvi 5y ago
    Or like CPU architectures. CISC vs RISC
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ncpa-cpl 5y ago
  > I think it's also interesting to see how complex a language can get in order to become efficient. Like can you combine more than pronouns and tenses in a single word to make it more efficient. Spanish has an interesting way of linking verbs and pronouns together: For example: dáselo would be translated to English as: "(You) give it to him/her" Or: pasáselas would be "(You) pass those to them"
dig1 5y ago
I don't think the analysis is good here. If we want the most efficient writing language (written representation of some information), that could be emoji. You can't beat this: I ♥ . Three characters and can be translated (by reader) to almost any language without knowing target language letters and grammar. [edit]: looks like HN doesn't allow U+2615 (hot beverage) character.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Three characters and can be translated (by reader) to almost any language without knowing target language letters and grammar. You have to understand what a heart symbol is, and know that "I" is an english pronoun and how it's used. According to google translate, "I love" in Chinese is 我愛. That's only two characters. Emoji is very limited in what it can express, and unusable if you want to write with anything else than a keyboard.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Emojis are pretty complicated to either draw or type. While drawing a heart is imo easier than writing the word love, typing it isn't.
- ncpa-cpl 5y ago
  > You can't beat this: I ♥ . It even works with very young kids. I've "chatted" with my god daughter in WhatsApp using emojis way before she learnt how to read and write!
elefantastisch 5y ago
For anyone wanting to undertake analysis like this, a fairly common choice of text for comparing languages is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is translated into a staggering number of languages. See https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/introduction.aspx https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/introduction.aspx
- Kankuro 5y ago
  About 10 years ago, I used the translations of KDE texts to estimate how much space texts in a given language could take when translated into another language (we had an internal web page editor that only allowed putting texts and widgets at fixed x-y coordinates, so allocating extra-space for translation was a sad work-around). http://fabsk.eu/i18n/#en;fr http://fabsk.eu/i18n/#en;fr
domenicrosati 5y ago
For folks who are interested. This is actually an already well studied topic! It is called "language complexity". The consensus is that in aggregate (all language artifacts like writing, conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex than any other since complexity on one dimension (say chinese writing for Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin morphology or conjugation). This is called the compensation hypothesis at least in phonology (how we speak a language) Pixels per character is certainly an interesting dimension of complexity and I would encourage the author to try to get this ready for publication at SIGMORPHON or something like that! See https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685301.001.0001/acprof-9780199685301 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/1... for more on complexity
- yakkomajuri 5y ago
  I've taken note to read up more on language complexity - had come across it before but didn't dig too deep!
- setr 5y ago
  > The consensus is that in aggregate (all language artifacts like writing, conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex than any other since complexity on one dimension (say chinese writing for Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin morphology or conjugation). This doesn’t sound right; it’s easy to imagine a terribly inefficient language (replace every letter/phoneme in English with thousands), and probably easy to make a language that’s worse in every aspect to an existing one Which means you should be able to go the other way, and identify a language more efficient in every aspect than an existing one, unless they’ve all hit maximum optimality within their constraints. But that’s unlikely, because language is burdened by the constraint of history, which tends to lock inefficiencies in place in favor of “minimum disturbance” when introducing change. And since we don’t care about that constraint when judging language efficiency, it should unlock some optimizations not yet applied.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > This doesn’t sound right; it’s easy to imagine a terribly inefficient language (replace every letter/phoneme in English with thousands), and probably easy to make a language that’s worse in every aspect to an existing one Maybe GP was referring to actual languages, which are optimized by use, rather than possible languages.
chakkepolja 5y ago
Also interesting is how the phonetics of some languages & dialects can result in faster talking. I heard that Tamil having much less number of consonants, and lacking the ones that need more stress (I forgot the term for this) makes it much faster to speak. Although Malayalam sounds faster to me, probably due to accent it is spoken.
charlieyu1 5y ago
Glad to see Cantonese tops the chart. Maybe not that surprising afterall
samatman 5y ago
The method is of course bizarrely disconnected from the goal, but the author does specifically say he doesn't care, when someone kindly pointed that out. One is left musing about the overarching purpose of such a document, given that. If one were continue down this road, instead of wisely and immediately turning tail and heading towards semioticians and other people who know what they're talking about: try compressing each font glyph instead. the big ones? have a lot of 'stuff' in them. This isn't uh. Robust, you feel me, against things like yeah. Serifs. For example but, it ain't nothing. Counting the black, on the other hand, I must concur this matters more to the person in the department who orders toner, than to the information theoretician of graphology.
Zababa 5y ago
I think the measure here is "information density on a physical surface". For example, someone commented on a 4x3 font for English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046035. This allows you to put way more information on a pixel surface, but at the cost (at least to my eyes) of time spent reading, as this font is harder (at least to me) to read. Which I would compare to more efficient compression algorithm, that take more time to encode/decode. This could be used when storing information on a physical media, like a book or a microfilm.
- timbit42 5y ago
  1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I like it, but I would describe it as an encoding more than a font. I also think it's 1x5, not 1x8. In that case, it would be more than twice as efficient as the 4x3. In a way, it's a restricted ascii subset.
sam_goody 5y ago
Some years ago I came across a handbook of Pittman shorthand. I figured most of the time I spend reading is spent scanning the words with my eyes. Shorthand is so much more concise, it would surely save me time if I wrote a text-to-shorthand converter [ViolentMonkey], and then learned to read shorthand. After much time learning shorthand, and fiddling with programming a conversion script, I got frustrated. So I wrote to one of the world's experts on Pittman shorthand (you can find anything on the net) and asked her about my project. Surprisingly, she said that even for her, a world expert, she reads Pittman at the same speed she reads non shorthand text. Due to the density of the shorthand, and the fact that the mind has to decode it, makes it slower to read!! Anyways, I never finished, but at least I learned the basics of shorthand :) For the uninitiated, before computers, dictation was very slow, and reporters needed a faster way to record what they were hearing. They came up with various scripts, wherein lines represent sounds, and for a while these were taught in every college. Till today, shorthand is faster than typing, and there are reporters keypads that have created a shorthand for the keyboard, which is even faster. Much faster.
wcoenen 5y ago
I think font selection is important to make it a fair comparison. For each language, the minimal resolution "pixel font" that still works should be used. (E.g. Chinese hanzi are going to require more resolution than the latin alphabet.) The fonts used in Minecraft might be a good start. However, once you do that, it probably doesn't make sense to only count the "on" pixels. Because in a minimal font, "off" pixels will probably contribute as much information as "on" pixels. So you should just count the total number of pixels required to render the piece of text.
- timbit42 5y ago
  1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    We have a different definition of "still works" :-)
stewbrew 5y ago
"The magazine had a little travel article, and it was written in English on one page and Thai on the other." Interesting Sunday study but language is supposed to be spoken. Arab and Hebrew skip vowels in written texts so they seem to be more efficient. But filling in these vowels requires cognitive extra work. That's why both languages offer extra notation for people who aren't that experienced with the written form. Does it make a difference when speaking a language?
was_a_dev 5y ago
While intersting, and the methodlogy has valid critique. I wish there were a figure plotting the results clearly. Such qualitiative reporting made the whole thing feel more opaque.
SeanLuke 5y ago
> This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters). Let's put aside the fact that this guy just equated "Chinese" with "Mandarin". This claim he's making suggests his entire measurement mechanism is broken. Simplified Chinese is more "efficient" in terms of Traditional Chinese only in that it requires fewer strokes to draw each character. But the author spent quite some time harping on information. Given that Simplified and Traditional chinese have (for purposes of discussion here) identical characters, just represented differently, from an information standpoint they are exactly the same. Information means something, and it is not number of pixels. I know this is outside the topic of the article, but it's worth mentioning that many Chinese scholars think Simplified Chinese has been a disaster. Traditional Chinese characters have strong visual relationships to one another depending on how they both sound, or whether they have similar meanings, or whether they were linguistically derived from the same historical source. This assists in memorizing them: a chinese person might come across some character she doesn't know but looks like a set of other characters, and can make a good guess as to what it actually is based on its relationship to them and its context in the sentence. The designers of Simplified Chinese broke a very large number of these rules: similarity didn't matter any more, just reduction in stroke count. As a result, Simplified Chinese is much harder to learn.
- yakkomajuri 5y ago
  Hey, appreciate the comment. The article is not about Chinese so I can't cover every bit of nuance associated with the language group. I have studied it for a bit, so I'm not completely lost in this space. But putting aside the discussion of Simplified Chinese being better or not, the Limitations section does say: "Maybe the fact that Chinese characters were originally representative drawings helps association in the brain despite the extra strokes?"
- Jansen312 5y ago
  Imagine you are limited to only pen and paper and need to communicate with another using written Chinese. Then even though what you convey will be exactly same meaning and characters count, simplified will consumed less effort (less ink and paper as well) to deliver equivalent same message in Chinese Traditional. From language studies perspective they view a token as basic unit of information, but in engineering and practicality, OP ideas of pixel measurement would be better. You can't transmit information to humans using "token" but displayed form via pixels. As for Simplified Chinese is much harder to learn, let just say Mao had proven you wrong with vast majority Chinese (outside of China) learning Simplified form much faster and less effort than Traditional form. Even Taiwanese using simplified form to describe the name "tai" in Taiwan.
reil_convnet 5y ago
I am not sure whether I agree with the analysis, maybe will take more time to process whether the pixels metric really means efficiency. However, one interesting point is that the author concludes "Hebrew" and "Gujrati" are the most efficient languages. The cultures to which these languages belong are both stereotyped to be very efficient and pragmatic businesspeople. So maybe they have a general culture which reflects in their day to day activities, even writing. Arabic [which is the third on the list] also belongs to a people who traditionally have been associated with trade, before they found all the black gold.
- golemiprague 5y ago
nekcihc 5y ago
Wasn't there recently an article about bits of information per second, that all languages more or less are delivering the same information(tone differences, stress and other audial information also delivers information): https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav... Given the fact that Chinese writing is used for communication for various people, that each have their own language, the main component in learning Chinese is not about learning language - how to pronounce words, but what these characters mean - universally in all those languages - even English or Spanish people might communicate with Chinese if they knew meanings of Chinese "writing". This is big advantage when various people have to live together in one country, but the main disadvantage over alphabetic writing is that it is not easy to mass educate people to learn thousands of graphical representations and combinations of those "writings", than to learn 20-40 alphabetic letters, that(more or less) are related to sounds. IMO, English is worst alphabetical language, and it is standing out, as it has not modernized it's alphabet(like rest of Europeans did 100-200 years ago) and most people learn English not from what they can read(it does not help, that various 20+ Brittish dialects can pronounce words differently), but binding to memory what is written - almost the same way how Chinese do. From my experience, there is staggering amount of written illiteracy among native British people, that I have never seen compared to other Europeans. Because of this experience, my English has become worse(some of the mistakes can not be blamed on keyboard), that what it used to be - also I don't care about errors anymore, because I have adapted to locals. PS I think, that knowing different languages is like being different human. There are some languages, that makes you act very stressful and fast talking, and then there are some languages that are slower and where you can think before saying something. There is also difference between how jokes are present.
rahimiali 5y ago
A lot of valid criticism here about the measure of complexity, but considering the author’s initial motivation, I think the approach makes sense: “The magazine had a little travel article, and it was written in English on one page and Thai on the other. The Thai version was so much shorter that I started to wonder if it was more efficient.” If the goal is to identify which language would have produced the most subjectively visual “short article” per the description above, the approach sounds ok. For example, concerns with serifs, variations in character sizes, the information content of characters, etc become moot because they contribute to visual clutter and typography, which the author would want to count against the language.
- robocat 5y ago
  > The Thai version was so much shorter I don't think that Thai compresses much. Here is the above comment I replied to, Google translated into Thai (will be totally incorrect but a reasonably guess to length? I would guess English with spaces removed would be similar length?) การวิพากษ์วิจารณ์ที่ถูกต้องมากมายที่นี่เกี่ยวกับการวัดความซับซ้อน แต่เมื่อพิจารณาถึงแรงจูงใจเริ่มต้นของผู้เขียนฉันคิดว่าวิธีการนี้สมเหตุสมผล: "นิตยสารมีบทความการเดินทางเล็กน้อยและเขียนเป็นภาษาอังกฤษในหน้าหนึ่งและภาษาไทยในอีกหน้าหนึ่ง เวอร์ชั่นภาษาไทยสั้นกว่ามากจนเริ่มสงสัยว่ามันมีประสิทธิภาพมากกว่าหรือไม่" หากเป้าหมายคือการระบุว่าภาษาใดที่จะผลิต "บทความสั้น" ที่มองเห็นได้อัตนัยมากที่สุดตามคําอธิบายข้างต้นวิธีการฟังดูโอเค ตัวอย่างเช่นความกังวลเกี่ยวกับ serifs การเปลี่ยนแปลงของขนาดตัวละครเนื้อหาข้อมูลของตัวละคร ฯลฯ กลายเป็น moot เพราะพวกเขานําไปสู่ความยุ่งเหยิงทางสายตาและการพิมพ์ซึ่งผู้เขียนต้องการนับกับภาษา
  - thematrixturtle 5y ago
    Thai script "compresses" quite well compared to English because it does not use spaces between words, the vowel "a" is implicit, and many (but not all) other vowels are diacritics, not full letters. However, tone marking is inefficient (diacritics and silent letters), there are many duplicate letters for consonants, and the writing system and spoken language have diverged quite a bit.
monsieurgaufre 5y ago
> Out of all the French dialects included in the dataset, Canadian was the only one with different wording. I'd be curious to hear from someone who speaks French about whether the Canadian version has words that are actually not used elsewhere or if it's just a matter of choice of words. As a CA_FR speaker, I think it's a bit from column A and a bit from column B. Tho, regional differences exists everywhere so I can't be absolutely certain. Proximity to EN_US and EN_UK probably affected CA_FR differently. Levels of language also affects the variety/frequency of anglicisms.
- bistro 5y ago
  Comparing the fr to the fr_CA texts though, the Canadian one is wordier for no good reason. E.g., "nous nous efforçons de les protéger, tout en vous permettant d'en garder le contrôle." vs "nous faisons tout notre possible pour protéger vos renseignements et pour vous permettre de les gérer."
zharknado 5y ago
This is sort of like saying “which metabolic process is most efficient?” across organisms. If you’re sufficiently reductive you can answer it, but only by stripping the emergent phenomenon out of the evolutionary context in which it emerged, i.e. by choosing an arbitrary definition of “efficiency”. If you ask instead which process or language is “most fit” for its context, the answer is probably “they’re all pretty fit, except the ones we tried to design in a lab.” Seems like it ends up being more interesting to ask why they ended up being different and how it made them more fit.
sharikous 5y ago
I guessed Hebrew would be between the densest ones. In my experience using ktiv haser would make Hebrw win hands down. It's impressive to see how bigger is the English translation than the original text in translated Bible books.
skydhash 5y ago
Haitian Creole speaker here. We're in a weird spot. Where the majority of the vocabulary come from French, the grammar from west African languages, and heavy influence from Spanish and English. Due to the majority of the population not able to write , the language is easy to learn and speak. But the writing is not as precise as French or English, making it a bit tedious when explaining things. Verbs only have one form, with marker words to indicate mode and tense. Numerous words have multiple definitions or are very vague, so meaning is usually conveyed across by using comparisons and analogy. Easy to do when talking and adding a storyteller like to a conversation, but tedious when writing. The redeeming quality is that the grammar is simple and the orthography more so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
Clearly this isn't intended as a serious way of "ranking" languages, but I wish there was a way to measure the "efficiency" of languages from the same geographic setup (and, preferably, family) but in different time periods, e.g. Akkadian vs. Babylonian vs. early Hebrew vs. early Arabic. One would expect the efficiency to improve over time, but maybe this is not true. Is there anything in this topic that one can read?
- zeroimpl 5y ago
  I’m also curious how modern languages compare to older variants. Even modern English to Shakespeare stuff. I think to measure efficiency of a written language, you’d have to time how long it takes people to read it (and correctly answer some questions to prove they understood it).
agumonkey 5y ago
Efficiency comes from mastery.
robin_reala 5y ago
I’m a little bit confused at the assertion that “cart” and “cat” are phonetically similar enough to need an extra letter. They’re completely different sounds to my admittedly en-GB ears.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I suggest you read it again. That is not the assertion at all: > Consider the r in cart for instance. Without that r the word would clash with an existing word - cat, so the letter is significant in establishing meaning. The u in color is not, however. The point is that what we call a "cart" and a "cat" are different things, and that the additional letter "r" helps us differntiate these two things, because we get two different words (rather than, say, calling both things "cat" or "cart"). By contrast, there is nothing called "color" in British English, so dropping the "u" from "color" creates no ambiguity in meaning.
jl6 5y ago
I find there’s another dimension to communication efficiency which is nothing to do with cramming information into bits, but rather is about working with a close-knit group. What does it mean to be a close-knit group? When you spend a lot of time working, training or living together, you tune into each other’s frequency. You know what they are doing and how they are doing it. You each build a mental model of the others. You can focus contact time on the out-of-model communication that really matters. You can start to make accurate assumptions about what they are thinking. (This is infinite communication efficiency: information transmitted via zero bits!). It’s like a kind of compression where your experiences together build a pre-shared dictionary - which of course is exactly what a written language is; this is a further optimization through customization. I’ve seen this kind of “co-experience-bond” communication happen in small teams in the workplace, and I’ve heard third-hand about it emerging in military squads. And of course my wife and I can communicate across a room with a look and an eyebrow.
divingdragon 5y ago
> This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters). My first reaction to this is: "What? Cantonese?" I just knew something is wrong. So I checked the data and immediately see the issue. `yue_Hant_HK` ("Cantonese"), `zh_Hant_HK` (Chinese, Hong Kong) and `zh_Hant_MO` (Chinese, Macau) all uses the same text, while `zh_Hant` (Traditional Chinese) and `zh_Hant_TW` (Chinese, Taiwan) uses a different text. As it turns out, there is no Cantonese, just plain written Chinese (書面語, written language as we would call it). Both Hong Kong and Taiwan use the Traditional Chinese script, but the two don't exactly use the same vocabularies due to regional differences. For example, the term "privacy" is "私隱" in Hong Kong, but "隱私" in Taiwan. This is why there exists two versions of Traditional Chinese translations of the same text. Since they are likely done by different people (assuming they are not machine translations) they have different translation styles, which contributes to the difference in length of the two paragraphs. (Also, Cantonese can be written in Simplified Chinese, but that's all I will say regarding this topic.)
- princeb 5y ago
  the writing of cantonese is a complicated affair. the only analogy i can cook up is that - imagine if formally, everyone wrote English in German, but when you speak you speak English, and when you read English you'd see German words and sentence structures but you will preprocess it into English before understanding it. and with different levels of formality, would You with underschiedenly Germandegrees speak English. but in no case would you speak German.
hackerknows 5y ago
This paper measures the efficiency as Shannon information calculated on a Google corpus correlated against word length: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526 https://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526 This paper shows that speaker size correlates close to .9 with efficiency: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.019...
rendall 5y ago
> Minä rakastan kahvia This is like saying "I feel intimate of coffee". Finns wouldn't say that. Rakasta is translated as love but it's the kind of love reserved for immediate family or lovers, not just things you like a lot, and kahvi is in the wrong case, like having the wrong preposition. Minä pidän paljon kahvista is a more normal way to say "I like coffee a lot". The English "to love" doesn't really have a good translation in Finnish. And, since it's about efficiency, you can lop off the pronoun, since the verb conjugation implies it: Pidän paljon kahvista And, just a bit of soft context, the Finnish way of speaking is often terse, so if a Finn is saying they like something, it often had the same degree as when an American says they love something, otherwise they wouldn't bother mentioning it. So, you can get rid of the "much", too: Pidän kahvista
pippy 5y ago
I've often felt that English is a prime candidate for spelling reform. Being the modern lingua franca it makes sense to remove the unneeded vestigial remnants of other languages that adds extra unneeded complexity. For some reason it seems that English majors seem to be dead set against it, as they love etymology.
deleted 5y ago
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tpoacher 5y ago
My vote is for Russian. You know that scene at the end of Rocky IV, after Rocky wins the match and makes a speech, and the match announcer translates each sentence in Russian? There's a point in that speech where Rocky seems to say a really long sentence, and then the announcer seems to translate the whole thing in, like, 3 syllables. I always thought it was some kind of joke, as if the announcer decided most of that stuff wasn't that important to translate and decided to just skip to the gist of it. It wasn't until I learned a bit of russian myself that I realised it was an honest-to-God translation of the whole thing, and it's just that Russian can be super-efficient sometimes.
- openknot 5y ago
  This reminds me of the anecdote by Jimmy Carter about a Japanese translator doing what your initial impression described for a joke spoken in English. [0] [0] https://vimeo.com/36578569 https://vimeo.com/36578569
elforce002 5y ago
This is interesting. Most efficient? I think Spanish ought to be higher on the ranking. - Spanish writing/reading is WYSIWYG. We write "Walk" but we read it as "wôk". - Link to other romance languages. Communication with Portuguese, Italian, French, etc... albeit difficult, it's not impossible. - Learning other romance languages. This one is interesting. Going from Spanish to Portuguese, Spanish to Italian, etc... is quite interesting since you find the connections between them really funny and insightful. Caveats - The same could be said for the other romance languages but they don't have WYSIWYG, ie: Portuguese "vermelho" has the "lh" combo which add a soft i between "l" and "h", French "cuisine" omits the "e" when pronouncing the word, etc...

65 points by yakkomajuri 5y ago

k__ 5y ago

"Spanish from Spain ranking at 14 and Latin American Spanish landing at 32" Interesting result. I tries to learn Spanish a few years ago, and read that south american Spanish speakers were unhappy, that people from Spain would say their Spanish is the true and better one, and that Spain decide what is Spanish and what isn't. If that experiment holds true, their decisions at least led to a more efficient Spanish, haha.

leephillips 5y ago
The article continues: “The vast majority of differences are purely arbitrary word selections, though.” He’s not measuring a property of languages, but of particular translations of the privacy policy. By the way, sometimes North Americans encounter attitudes that UK English is in some way more authentic or better than their variety. That’s silly, too, and ahistorical. The difference with Spanish is that, like the French, they have an Academy that hands down official language judgments, and these are taken seriously by publishers, etc. The Academy is based in Spain, so they have a way to sort-of enforce their linguistic dominance. English is more anarchic.
- DFHippie 5y ago
  It's not just the absence of an a academy resisting linguistic change, it's that the people who brought English to North America were English, so the dialects that have evolved in North America have been evolving from Old English just as long as the dialects in England. And moreover, languages don't change at a uniform rate. Until recently the center of linguistic change in the anglosphere was London, so British English, and particularly London English, was more innovative than North American dialects. I expect things have gotten more complicated since there are populous power centers outside of London now.

dvh 5y ago

Slovak language have few single-letter words: a - and i - and also (archaic) k - to, towards o - about, at s - with u - near, next to v - in, inside z - from

forinti 5y ago
I started learning Russian when the pandemic started, and I found it to be more concise than the other languages I'm familiar with. Many phrases omit the verb, the case system precludes the need for connecting words, and also many little words are two or more words in other languages (туда - to there, сюда - to here, etc).
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  Congratulations, you just made the distinction between synthetic and analytical languages.
  - fourtrees 5y ago
    This is more to the general readership. Well, no, he's discovered the difference between non-logographic orthographies that map spoken sound to graphemes at a close to one-to-one ratio (like Spanish or German where 'a' usually mean /a/ and those that don't, like English or Irish, assign one graph to a multitude of speech sounds. This is old news to most of you, but consider 'g' or 'sh' (which represents one phoneme). but 'g' can be alternately represent the sounds in Geronimo, good, through, gnat, tongue, and probably others I'm forgetting (ng). Plenty of other graphemes follow suit. Analytical and synthethic languages alter meaning through predominantly differeent morphosyntactic mechanisms (and then meaning and pronunciation follow) Analytic languages are like Sanskrit or Turkish. Many changes in meaning come from altering the word by a suffix or the like or by phonemic alterations like vowel harmony (we still have a little of both in English perhaps) Analytic languages like Chinese, English, or French rely on (1) altering the word order to accomplish mostly the same thing. Again, it's a spectrum, and English has its fair share of analytic features. Synthetic languages might be a bit easier to learn, but any argument for the superiority of a single synthethetic language has to account for a plethora of typological features, like pitch, morphosyntactic alignment, pronunciation, pragmatics, elisions, clitics, particles, and so forth, that must be learnt. Any argument for the superiority of them as a whole runs into trouble at least at the point where languages seems to alternate between the two extremes. To go off topic b/c its sunday and im bored: there is no strong deductive proof among linguists that words exist universally. I mean that many languages, especially the lesser-contacted ones, and especially those in North American, whose languages feature one l o n g word or two that convey the same meaning as ten in English. To a speaker of Mohawk the category 'word' has to have little use. As does syntax (but not morphology! This leads me to wonder how much the word is a written convention or limited geographically. We once assumed that there were at most three genders. Since then we've discovered languages with >7 and 0 genders (noun classes). Likewise, other languages have different parts of speech. Korean features a prominent topic-marker and a class of adjectives that occupy the the verb's position in the sentence and function like a predicate. They need that those words to make sense of communication; English speakers really don't. Is perhaps the word also a concept that some groups have need of and others do not. On to the main topic, and particularly addressing the OP. Be careful not to confuse language with the script(s) they're written in. The to do not correlate beyond giving the an archeologist the ability to tell a logographic language from an alphabet. You project is cool when looking at various scripts from around the world. Secondly, be careful to claim, even in passing that rapidity/efficiency is superior. The Japanese nobility used to take eight seconds before beginning or continuing a conversation to allow for contemplation. The Ents had a similar convetion. There are benefits to the slow and inefficient. Clarity in speech is only one example. Anyhow, an afternoon well spent.

drexlspivey 5y ago

Counting pixels in a block of text to determine information density doesn’t sound like a very robust method to me. You could get very different results depending on the font you use to render the text.

jsnell 5y ago
It is worse than just sensitivity to different fonts, it ends up being sensitive to totally incidental details of the glyphs. In a Latin script, all the letters carry as much information. But this metric would treat a lowercase i as much more efficient than a capital W.
- Redoubts 5y ago
  Isn't that intentional? Picking sprawling glyphs for common items, and simple ones for rare meanings would be "inefficient" in some interesting sense. Indeed 'i' is the most common letter in Latin.
- im_dario 5y ago
  You are right but then is interesting to compare languages using Latin script. I find interesting that the first runner is Lithuanian, between non-Latin script languages, and the second is Swedish, with English coming third with quite a difference. Lithuanian has quite a heavy use of diacritic signs, but it seems to pack more information than the others. And other languages with similar diacritic signs are not close to it. Although the sensitivity to different fonts and details is real, we can draw some interesting conclusions from this Sunday exercise.
childintime 5y ago
English could be rendered in a 4x3 font (or even 3x3 font).. In this test it'll comfortably beat out any other language. See: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/325977/4x3_pixel https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/325977/4x3_pixel
- timbit42 5y ago

WJW 5y ago

I wonder if Hebrew scores so high because most words leave out the vowels. There are technically annotations on the consonants about which vowel should be pronounced, but outside primary school and language schools for immigrants nobody seems to use them. Arabic has a similar setup, I'm not familiar with Gujaranti but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to have a very similar setup.

samatman 5y ago
glsh cld wn ths cntst hndly if we chs crflly nd use th occsnl matrs lctinis
- linux2647 5y ago
  “English could win this contest handily if we chose carefully and use the occasional …”?
  - wolfgang42 5y ago
    My guess is “amateurish elocutionist” but I needed computer assistance: $ for t in matrs lctinis; do echo; grep '.*'$(echo $t | sed 's/./&.*/g') /usr/share/dict/words | grep -Ev "s$"; done Amaterasu amateurish amateurism humanitarianism masterstroke materialism materialist materialistic materialistically maturest metatarsal miniaturist misanthropist elocutionist For my own amusement, I also came up with another grammatically plausible “parsimonious” (inserting the fewest extra letters) interpretation: > Galosh-clad win this contest handily if we chase carefully and use the occasional mantras, elocutionist!
    - sarabande 5y ago
      This is great! As someone who immediately recognized it as 'mater lectionis' I wondered how someone unfamiliar with this aspect of Hebrew would attempt to solve the puzzle.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

willis936 5y ago

It's interesting, but flawed. Pixels don't matter, the cardinality of the set of characters does. You could replace every kanji with a minimal visual entropy version and make a "more efficient" language by the pixel complexity metric. Sure, it'd be hard to read. Information theory applied to linguistics is pretty well trodden ground. Some of the earliest applications of information theory was answering questions like this correctly. Importantly, languages do not evolve to be "maximally efficient" in the bits per second sense. They evolved to be maximally effective. You'll find that the difference between entropy and word length (written or spoken) is almost entirely spent on channel coding. When you lose characters, or parts of characters, or words, or phonemes, the meaning can be recovered. If you were running at entropy a lost character would make the entire message nonsense. Edit: the same goes for visual entropy too. The "most efficient" language is the one I just made up: where the language with the largest cardinality of words (I'll pick Kanji) has each character mapped to a unique bitmap of noise. Easier to just leave the characters as they are and let the computer do that part ;)

smitty1e 5y ago
Using a fixed, non-trivial passage is helpful for normalizing across languages. One wonders what the literature has to say regarding generalizing information across topics. Is it easier to convey some topics in some languages? For example, Philosophy in Greek? In our day, such inquiry may not be possible due to Political Correctness.
- willis936 5y ago
  It is obscene to suggest political motivations for a strawman that does not exist. If you did a simple google search for "linguistics information theory" you would find that there are still studies constantly coming out. Divorce yourself from your political tribe for just one moment out of the day.
  - pfortuny 5y ago
    Hey, you are right, totally. But the tone of your reply is off. Take it easy, it is not so important.

albatrosstrophy 5y ago

I speak both a 'most efficient' language (Arabic) and a 'least efficient' (Malay). My take ia that while Arabic is a very concise language, the learning curve is really steep. Verbs has to be conjugated to accommodate pronouns as well as tense. So in order to say 'I ate', the root word akala has to be conjugated to akaltu. Sometimes the conjugation becomes so complex that it hardly looks like its root word. Malay meanwhile, while seemingly less efficient, is much more straight forward. There is no need to conjugate verbs. Instead to say 'I ate', you say saya (I) sudah (already) makan (eat). It's very accessible to beginners. I think it's also interesting to see how complex a language can get in order to become efficient. Like can you combine more than pronouns and tenses in a single word to make it more efficient.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Just like a programming language, in fact.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Humans are mutually programming each other using homoiconic phonetic languages.
- umvi 5y ago
  Or like CPU architectures. CISC vs RISC
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ncpa-cpl 5y ago
> I think it's also interesting to see how complex a language can get in order to become efficient. Like can you combine more than pronouns and tenses in a single word to make it more efficient. Spanish has an interesting way of linking verbs and pronouns together: For example: dáselo would be translated to English as: "(You) give it to him/her" Or: pasáselas would be "(You) pass those to them"

dig1 5y ago

I don't think the analysis is good here. If we want the most efficient writing language (written representation of some information), that could be emoji. You can't beat this: I ♥ . Three characters and can be translated (by reader) to almost any language without knowing target language letters and grammar. [edit]: looks like HN doesn't allow U+2615 (hot beverage) character.

Zababa 5y ago
> Three characters and can be translated (by reader) to almost any language without knowing target language letters and grammar. You have to understand what a heart symbol is, and know that "I" is an english pronoun and how it's used. According to google translate, "I love" in Chinese is 我愛. That's only two characters. Emoji is very limited in what it can express, and unusable if you want to write with anything else than a keyboard.
pessimizer 5y ago
Emojis are pretty complicated to either draw or type. While drawing a heart is imo easier than writing the word love, typing it isn't.
ncpa-cpl 5y ago
> You can't beat this: I ♥ . It even works with very young kids. I've "chatted" with my god daughter in WhatsApp using emojis way before she learnt how to read and write!

elefantastisch 5y ago

For anyone wanting to undertake analysis like this, a fairly common choice of text for comparing languages is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is translated into a staggering number of languages. See https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/introduction.aspx https://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/introduction.aspx

Kankuro 5y ago
About 10 years ago, I used the translations of KDE texts to estimate how much space texts in a given language could take when translated into another language (we had an internal web page editor that only allowed putting texts and widgets at fixed x-y coordinates, so allocating extra-space for translation was a sad work-around). http://fabsk.eu/i18n/#en;fr http://fabsk.eu/i18n/#en;fr

domenicrosati 5y ago

For folks who are interested. This is actually an already well studied topic! It is called "language complexity". The consensus is that in aggregate (all language artifacts like writing, conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex than any other since complexity on one dimension (say chinese writing for Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin morphology or conjugation). This is called the compensation hypothesis at least in phonology (how we speak a language) Pixels per character is certainly an interesting dimension of complexity and I would encourage the author to try to get this ready for publication at SIGMORPHON or something like that! See https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685301.001.0001/acprof-9780199685301 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/1... for more on complexity

yakkomajuri 5y ago
I've taken note to read up more on language complexity - had come across it before but didn't dig too deep!
setr 5y ago
> The consensus is that in aggregate (all language artifacts like writing, conjugation, syntax) no language is more complex than any other since complexity on one dimension (say chinese writing for Mandarin) is compensated in another (Mandarin morphology or conjugation). This doesn’t sound right; it’s easy to imagine a terribly inefficient language (replace every letter/phoneme in English with thousands), and probably easy to make a language that’s worse in every aspect to an existing one Which means you should be able to go the other way, and identify a language more efficient in every aspect than an existing one, unless they’ve all hit maximum optimality within their constraints. But that’s unlikely, because language is burdened by the constraint of history, which tends to lock inefficiencies in place in favor of “minimum disturbance” when introducing change. And since we don’t care about that constraint when judging language efficiency, it should unlock some optimizations not yet applied.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > This doesn’t sound right; it’s easy to imagine a terribly inefficient language (replace every letter/phoneme in English with thousands), and probably easy to make a language that’s worse in every aspect to an existing one Maybe GP was referring to actual languages, which are optimized by use, rather than possible languages.

chakkepolja 5y ago

Also interesting is how the phonetics of some languages & dialects can result in faster talking. I heard that Tamil having much less number of consonants, and lacking the ones that need more stress (I forgot the term for this) makes it much faster to speak. Although Malayalam sounds faster to me, probably due to accent it is spoken.

charlieyu1 5y ago

Glad to see Cantonese tops the chart. Maybe not that surprising afterall

samatman 5y ago

The method is of course bizarrely disconnected from the goal, but the author does specifically say he doesn't care, when someone kindly pointed that out. One is left musing about the overarching purpose of such a document, given that. If one were continue down this road, instead of wisely and immediately turning tail and heading towards semioticians and other people who know what they're talking about: try compressing each font glyph instead. the big ones? have a lot of 'stuff' in them. This isn't uh. Robust, you feel me, against things like yeah. Serifs. For example but, it ain't nothing. Counting the black, on the other hand, I must concur this matters more to the person in the department who orders toner, than to the information theoretician of graphology.

Zababa 5y ago

I think the measure here is "information density on a physical surface". For example, someone commented on a 4x3 font for English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046035. This allows you to put way more information on a pixel surface, but at the cost (at least to my eyes) of time spent reading, as this font is harder (at least to me) to read. Which I would compare to more efficient compression algorithm, that take more time to encode/decode. This could be used when storing information on a physical media, like a book or a microfilm.

timbit42 5y ago
1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/
- Zababa 5y ago
  I like it, but I would describe it as an encoding more than a font. I also think it's 1x5, not 1x8. In that case, it would be more than twice as efficient as the 4x3. In a way, it's a restricted ascii subset.

sam_goody 5y ago

Some years ago I came across a handbook of Pittman shorthand. I figured most of the time I spend reading is spent scanning the words with my eyes. Shorthand is so much more concise, it would surely save me time if I wrote a text-to-shorthand converter [ViolentMonkey], and then learned to read shorthand. After much time learning shorthand, and fiddling with programming a conversion script, I got frustrated. So I wrote to one of the world's experts on Pittman shorthand (you can find anything on the net) and asked her about my project. Surprisingly, she said that even for her, a world expert, she reads Pittman at the same speed she reads non shorthand text. Due to the density of the shorthand, and the fact that the mind has to decode it, makes it slower to read!! Anyways, I never finished, but at least I learned the basics of shorthand :) For the uninitiated, before computers, dictation was very slow, and reporters needed a faster way to record what they were hearing. They came up with various scripts, wherein lines represent sounds, and for a while these were taught in every college. Till today, shorthand is faster than typing, and there are reporters keypads that have created a shorthand for the keyboard, which is even faster. Much faster.

wcoenen 5y ago

I think font selection is important to make it a fair comparison. For each language, the minimal resolution "pixel font" that still works should be used. (E.g. Chinese hanzi are going to require more resolution than the latin alphabet.) The fonts used in Minecraft might be a good start. However, once you do that, it probably doesn't make sense to only count the "on" pixels. Because in a minimal font, "off" pixels will probably contribute as much information as "on" pixels. So you should just count the total number of pixels required to render the piece of text.

timbit42 5y ago
1x8 pixel font: https://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/
- wcoenen 5y ago
  We have a different definition of "still works" :-)

stewbrew 5y ago

"The magazine had a little travel article, and it was written in English on one page and Thai on the other." Interesting Sunday study but language is supposed to be spoken. Arab and Hebrew skip vowels in written texts so they seem to be more efficient. But filling in these vowels requires cognitive extra work. That's why both languages offer extra notation for people who aren't that experienced with the written form. Does it make a difference when speaking a language?

was_a_dev 5y ago

While intersting, and the methodlogy has valid critique. I wish there were a figure plotting the results clearly. Such qualitiative reporting made the whole thing feel more opaque.

SeanLuke 5y ago

> This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters). Let's put aside the fact that this guy just equated "Chinese" with "Mandarin". This claim he's making suggests his entire measurement mechanism is broken. Simplified Chinese is more "efficient" in terms of Traditional Chinese only in that it requires fewer strokes to draw each character. But the author spent quite some time harping on information. Given that Simplified and Traditional chinese have (for purposes of discussion here) identical characters, just represented differently, from an information standpoint they are exactly the same. Information means something, and it is not number of pixels. I know this is outside the topic of the article, but it's worth mentioning that many Chinese scholars think Simplified Chinese has been a disaster. Traditional Chinese characters have strong visual relationships to one another depending on how they both sound, or whether they have similar meanings, or whether they were linguistically derived from the same historical source. This assists in memorizing them: a chinese person might come across some character she doesn't know but looks like a set of other characters, and can make a good guess as to what it actually is based on its relationship to them and its context in the sentence. The designers of Simplified Chinese broke a very large number of these rules: similarity didn't matter any more, just reduction in stroke count. As a result, Simplified Chinese is much harder to learn.

yakkomajuri 5y ago
Hey, appreciate the comment. The article is not about Chinese so I can't cover every bit of nuance associated with the language group. I have studied it for a bit, so I'm not completely lost in this space. But putting aside the discussion of Simplified Chinese being better or not, the Limitations section does say: "Maybe the fact that Chinese characters were originally representative drawings helps association in the brain despite the extra strokes?"
Jansen312 5y ago
Imagine you are limited to only pen and paper and need to communicate with another using written Chinese. Then even though what you convey will be exactly same meaning and characters count, simplified will consumed less effort (less ink and paper as well) to deliver equivalent same message in Chinese Traditional. From language studies perspective they view a token as basic unit of information, but in engineering and practicality, OP ideas of pixel measurement would be better. You can't transmit information to humans using "token" but displayed form via pixels. As for Simplified Chinese is much harder to learn, let just say Mao had proven you wrong with vast majority Chinese (outside of China) learning Simplified form much faster and less effort than Traditional form. Even Taiwanese using simplified form to describe the name "tai" in Taiwan.

reil_convnet 5y ago

I am not sure whether I agree with the analysis, maybe will take more time to process whether the pixels metric really means efficiency. However, one interesting point is that the author concludes "Hebrew" and "Gujrati" are the most efficient languages. The cultures to which these languages belong are both stereotyped to be very efficient and pragmatic businesspeople. So maybe they have a general culture which reflects in their day to day activities, even writing. Arabic [which is the third on the list] also belongs to a people who traditionally have been associated with trade, before they found all the black gold.

golemiprague 5y ago

nekcihc 5y ago

Wasn't there recently an article about bits of information per second, that all languages more or less are delivering the same information(tone differences, stress and other audial information also delivers information): https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav... Given the fact that Chinese writing is used for communication for various people, that each have their own language, the main component in learning Chinese is not about learning language - how to pronounce words, but what these characters mean - universally in all those languages - even English or Spanish people might communicate with Chinese if they knew meanings of Chinese "writing". This is big advantage when various people have to live together in one country, but the main disadvantage over alphabetic writing is that it is not easy to mass educate people to learn thousands of graphical representations and combinations of those "writings", than to learn 20-40 alphabetic letters, that(more or less) are related to sounds. IMO, English is worst alphabetical language, and it is standing out, as it has not modernized it's alphabet(like rest of Europeans did 100-200 years ago) and most people learn English not from what they can read(it does not help, that various 20+ Brittish dialects can pronounce words differently), but binding to memory what is written - almost the same way how Chinese do. From my experience, there is staggering amount of written illiteracy among native British people, that I have never seen compared to other Europeans. Because of this experience, my English has become worse(some of the mistakes can not be blamed on keyboard), that what it used to be - also I don't care about errors anymore, because I have adapted to locals. PS I think, that knowing different languages is like being different human. There are some languages, that makes you act very stressful and fast talking, and then there are some languages that are slower and where you can think before saying something. There is also difference between how jokes are present.

rahimiali 5y ago

A lot of valid criticism here about the measure of complexity, but considering the author’s initial motivation, I think the approach makes sense: “The magazine had a little travel article, and it was written in English on one page and Thai on the other. The Thai version was so much shorter that I started to wonder if it was more efficient.” If the goal is to identify which language would have produced the most subjectively visual “short article” per the description above, the approach sounds ok. For example, concerns with serifs, variations in character sizes, the information content of characters, etc become moot because they contribute to visual clutter and typography, which the author would want to count against the language.

robocat 5y ago
> The Thai version was so much shorter I don't think that Thai compresses much. Here is the above comment I replied to, Google translated into Thai (will be totally incorrect but a reasonably guess to length? I would guess English with spaces removed would be similar length?) การวิพากษ์วิจารณ์ที่ถูกต้องมากมายที่นี่เกี่ยวกับการวัดความซับซ้อน แต่เมื่อพิจารณาถึงแรงจูงใจเริ่มต้นของผู้เขียนฉันคิดว่าวิธีการนี้สมเหตุสมผล: "นิตยสารมีบทความการเดินทางเล็กน้อยและเขียนเป็นภาษาอังกฤษในหน้าหนึ่งและภาษาไทยในอีกหน้าหนึ่ง เวอร์ชั่นภาษาไทยสั้นกว่ามากจนเริ่มสงสัยว่ามันมีประสิทธิภาพมากกว่าหรือไม่" หากเป้าหมายคือการระบุว่าภาษาใดที่จะผลิต "บทความสั้น" ที่มองเห็นได้อัตนัยมากที่สุดตามคําอธิบายข้างต้นวิธีการฟังดูโอเค ตัวอย่างเช่นความกังวลเกี่ยวกับ serifs การเปลี่ยนแปลงของขนาดตัวละครเนื้อหาข้อมูลของตัวละคร ฯลฯ กลายเป็น moot เพราะพวกเขานําไปสู่ความยุ่งเหยิงทางสายตาและการพิมพ์ซึ่งผู้เขียนต้องการนับกับภาษา
- thematrixturtle 5y ago
  Thai script "compresses" quite well compared to English because it does not use spaces between words, the vowel "a" is implicit, and many (but not all) other vowels are diacritics, not full letters. However, tone marking is inefficient (diacritics and silent letters), there are many duplicate letters for consonants, and the writing system and spoken language have diverged quite a bit.

monsieurgaufre 5y ago

> Out of all the French dialects included in the dataset, Canadian was the only one with different wording. I'd be curious to hear from someone who speaks French about whether the Canadian version has words that are actually not used elsewhere or if it's just a matter of choice of words. As a CA_FR speaker, I think it's a bit from column A and a bit from column B. Tho, regional differences exists everywhere so I can't be absolutely certain. Proximity to EN_US and EN_UK probably affected CA_FR differently. Levels of language also affects the variety/frequency of anglicisms.

bistro 5y ago
Comparing the fr to the fr_CA texts though, the Canadian one is wordier for no good reason. E.g., "nous nous efforçons de les protéger, tout en vous permettant d'en garder le contrôle." vs "nous faisons tout notre possible pour protéger vos renseignements et pour vous permettre de les gérer."

zharknado 5y ago

This is sort of like saying “which metabolic process is most efficient?” across organisms. If you’re sufficiently reductive you can answer it, but only by stripping the emergent phenomenon out of the evolutionary context in which it emerged, i.e. by choosing an arbitrary definition of “efficiency”. If you ask instead which process or language is “most fit” for its context, the answer is probably “they’re all pretty fit, except the ones we tried to design in a lab.” Seems like it ends up being more interesting to ask why they ended up being different and how it made them more fit.

sharikous 5y ago

I guessed Hebrew would be between the densest ones. In my experience using ktiv haser would make Hebrw win hands down. It's impressive to see how bigger is the English translation than the original text in translated Bible books.

skydhash 5y ago

Haitian Creole speaker here. We're in a weird spot. Where the majority of the vocabulary come from French, the grammar from west African languages, and heavy influence from Spanish and English. Due to the majority of the population not able to write , the language is easy to learn and speak. But the writing is not as precise as French or English, making it a bit tedious when explaining things. Verbs only have one form, with marker words to indicate mode and tense. Numerous words have multiple definitions or are very vague, so meaning is usually conveyed across by using comparisons and analogy. Easy to do when talking and adding a storyteller like to a conversation, but tedious when writing. The redeeming quality is that the grammar is simple and the orthography more so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

Clearly this isn't intended as a serious way of "ranking" languages, but I wish there was a way to measure the "efficiency" of languages from the same geographic setup (and, preferably, family) but in different time periods, e.g. Akkadian vs. Babylonian vs. early Hebrew vs. early Arabic. One would expect the efficiency to improve over time, but maybe this is not true. Is there anything in this topic that one can read?

zeroimpl 5y ago
I’m also curious how modern languages compare to older variants. Even modern English to Shakespeare stuff. I think to measure efficiency of a written language, you’d have to time how long it takes people to read it (and correctly answer some questions to prove they understood it).

agumonkey 5y ago

Efficiency comes from mastery.

robin_reala 5y ago

I’m a little bit confused at the assertion that “cart” and “cat” are phonetically similar enough to need an extra letter. They’re completely different sounds to my admittedly en-GB ears.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I suggest you read it again. That is not the assertion at all: > Consider the r in cart for instance. Without that r the word would clash with an existing word - cat, so the letter is significant in establishing meaning. The u in color is not, however. The point is that what we call a "cart" and a "cat" are different things, and that the additional letter "r" helps us differntiate these two things, because we get two different words (rather than, say, calling both things "cat" or "cart"). By contrast, there is nothing called "color" in British English, so dropping the "u" from "color" creates no ambiguity in meaning.

jl6 5y ago

I find there’s another dimension to communication efficiency which is nothing to do with cramming information into bits, but rather is about working with a close-knit group. What does it mean to be a close-knit group? When you spend a lot of time working, training or living together, you tune into each other’s frequency. You know what they are doing and how they are doing it. You each build a mental model of the others. You can focus contact time on the out-of-model communication that really matters. You can start to make accurate assumptions about what they are thinking. (This is infinite communication efficiency: information transmitted via zero bits!). It’s like a kind of compression where your experiences together build a pre-shared dictionary - which of course is exactly what a written language is; this is a further optimization through customization. I’ve seen this kind of “co-experience-bond” communication happen in small teams in the workplace, and I’ve heard third-hand about it emerging in military squads. And of course my wife and I can communicate across a room with a look and an eyebrow.

divingdragon 5y ago

> This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters). My first reaction to this is: "What? Cantonese?" I just knew something is wrong. So I checked the data and immediately see the issue. `yue_Hant_HK` ("Cantonese"), `zh_Hant_HK` (Chinese, Hong Kong) and `zh_Hant_MO` (Chinese, Macau) all uses the same text, while `zh_Hant` (Traditional Chinese) and `zh_Hant_TW` (Chinese, Taiwan) uses a different text. As it turns out, there is no Cantonese, just plain written Chinese (書面語, written language as we would call it). Both Hong Kong and Taiwan use the Traditional Chinese script, but the two don't exactly use the same vocabularies due to regional differences. For example, the term "privacy" is "私隱" in Hong Kong, but "隱私" in Taiwan. This is why there exists two versions of Traditional Chinese translations of the same text. Since they are likely done by different people (assuming they are not machine translations) they have different translation styles, which contributes to the difference in length of the two paragraphs. (Also, Cantonese can be written in Simplified Chinese, but that's all I will say regarding this topic.)

princeb 5y ago
the writing of cantonese is a complicated affair. the only analogy i can cook up is that - imagine if formally, everyone wrote English in German, but when you speak you speak English, and when you read English you'd see German words and sentence structures but you will preprocess it into English before understanding it. and with different levels of formality, would You with underschiedenly Germandegrees speak English. but in no case would you speak German.

hackerknows 5y ago

This paper measures the efficiency as Shannon information calculated on a Google corpus correlated against word length: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526 https://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526 This paper shows that speaker size correlates close to .9 with efficiency: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.019...

rendall 5y ago

> Minä rakastan kahvia This is like saying "I feel intimate of coffee". Finns wouldn't say that. Rakasta is translated as love but it's the kind of love reserved for immediate family or lovers, not just things you like a lot, and kahvi is in the wrong case, like having the wrong preposition. Minä pidän paljon kahvista is a more normal way to say "I like coffee a lot". The English "to love" doesn't really have a good translation in Finnish. And, since it's about efficiency, you can lop off the pronoun, since the verb conjugation implies it: Pidän paljon kahvista And, just a bit of soft context, the Finnish way of speaking is often terse, so if a Finn is saying they like something, it often had the same degree as when an American says they love something, otherwise they wouldn't bother mentioning it. So, you can get rid of the "much", too: Pidän kahvista

pippy 5y ago

I've often felt that English is a prime candidate for spelling reform. Being the modern lingua franca it makes sense to remove the unneeded vestigial remnants of other languages that adds extra unneeded complexity. For some reason it seems that English majors seem to be dead set against it, as they love etymology.

deleted 5y ago

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tpoacher 5y ago

My vote is for Russian. You know that scene at the end of Rocky IV, after Rocky wins the match and makes a speech, and the match announcer translates each sentence in Russian? There's a point in that speech where Rocky seems to say a really long sentence, and then the announcer seems to translate the whole thing in, like, 3 syllables. I always thought it was some kind of joke, as if the announcer decided most of that stuff wasn't that important to translate and decided to just skip to the gist of it. It wasn't until I learned a bit of russian myself that I realised it was an honest-to-God translation of the whole thing, and it's just that Russian can be super-efficient sometimes.

openknot 5y ago
This reminds me of the anecdote by Jimmy Carter about a Japanese translator doing what your initial impression described for a joke spoken in English. [0] [0] https://vimeo.com/36578569 https://vimeo.com/36578569

elforce002 5y ago

This is interesting. Most efficient? I think Spanish ought to be higher on the ranking. - Spanish writing/reading is WYSIWYG. We write "Walk" but we read it as "wôk". - Link to other romance languages. Communication with Portuguese, Italian, French, etc... albeit difficult, it's not impossible. - Learning other romance languages. This one is interesting. Going from Spanish to Portuguese, Spanish to Italian, etc... is quite interesting since you find the connections between them really funny and insightful. Caveats - The same could be said for the other romance languages but they don't have WYSIWYG, ie: Portuguese "vermelho" has the "lh" combo which add a soft i between "l" and "h", French "cuisine" omits the "e" when pronouncing the word, etc...