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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
by 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 agoUsing 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 agoIt 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.