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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 langua

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.
  - setr 5y ago
    Sure, but if they can be effectively compared in theory they should also be comparable in reality. And given that languages were developed over different histories and constraints (and lengths of time), it seems to me that a “terrible” real-world language is likely available and identifiable. And though perhaps difficult to compare, then there should be a “best” language, or at least, “top-N” class of languages, that are clearly superior to their peers. It’s highly unlikely that all languages are comparably well-optimized.
    - glial 5y ago
      If you can show this, you could get a publication out of it. Until then, you might find that reading the existing literature referenced by the commenter above is helpful.
      - setr 5y ago
        I’m not claiming I can do so, and asking me to do so is a cop-out — I’m simply reasoning about whether it’s possible to qualify a language at all — to do better than “they’re all the best” — because we know how to define something downright awful. But yes, at the top of the optimization spectrum you will always see trade offs between things as they can’t push every boundary simultaneously. But it’s difficult to imagine every language has reached that point. Or that no two languages in the world fall under similar goals/constraints, that evolve to the same targets, that one would be better than another at the same goals. How to find such a pairing, or define it, is a different issue. But identifying a terrible language should be possible, and thus I would expect we can do better than “everyone’s a winner”. And yes, I can read the literature (give me a minute, gotta ship the book, and probably any existing counterarguments first…), or you could just tell me where my reasoning has failed, since I’ve laid it bare (I’m assuming you’ve read the existing literature, to determine that the answer I seek lies there… you’re not the kind of guy to send me on a wild-goose chase, are you?)
thaumasiotes 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). That is broadly the consensus, with a couple of exceptions: - Writing is not part of the language and doesn't factor into complexity anywhere. Chinese writing is much more complex than the writing system of most other languages, but that's just not relevant to the spoken language. - Some languages are believed to be generally simpler than average due to having gone through a phase involving a large number of adults learning the language. Mandarin is one of those languages, as is English.
renox 5y ago
Uh? Given that I'm French I doubt very much that this is true.. Foreigners learning French have to spend a lot of time learning stupid things such as is-it a she-stone (une pierre) or a he-stone(un caillou)? Knowing where to write an or en when both sounds the same (on-om ai-è-es-est-ê ...), Lots of irregularities also. All these things bring a lot of complexity without any real meaningful gain.. At the opposite a language like Esperanto is really easy to learn..
- openknot 5y ago
  >All these things bring a lot of complexity without any real meaningful gain.. This assertion doesn't contradict the author's claim that no language is overall more complex than another. The usefulness of the complexity isn't part of the argument. >At the opposite a language like Esperanto is really easy to learn.. Esperanto is a constructed/invented language, deliberately created to reduce complexity. It's implied that the author was comparing the complexity of different languages that evolved naturally.
  - dwohnitmok 5y ago
    Moreover the implied consequence of the "equal complexity" thesis is that over time, were Esperanto to be more widely used as a mother tongue for a large population, it too would collect additional complexity as certain stylistic choices would start hardening into first idiomatic and non-idiomatic language patterns and then further into new grammatical and phonological rules.
    - renox 5y ago
      I'm not so sure: now we have academies which tries to codify language changes..

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.
- setr 5y ago
  Sure, but if they can be effectively compared in theory they should also be comparable in reality. And given that languages were developed over different histories and constraints (and lengths of time), it seems to me that a “terrible” real-world language is likely available and identifiable. And though perhaps difficult to compare, then there should be a “best” language, or at least, “top-N” class of languages, that are clearly superior to their peers. It’s highly unlikely that all languages are comparably well-optimized.
  - glial 5y ago
    If you can show this, you could get a publication out of it. Until then, you might find that reading the existing literature referenced by the commenter above is helpful.
    - setr 5y ago
      I’m not claiming I can do so, and asking me to do so is a cop-out — I’m simply reasoning about whether it’s possible to qualify a language at all — to do better than “they’re all the best” — because we know how to define something downright awful. But yes, at the top of the optimization spectrum you will always see trade offs between things as they can’t push every boundary simultaneously. But it’s difficult to imagine every language has reached that point. Or that no two languages in the world fall under similar goals/constraints, that evolve to the same targets, that one would be better than another at the same goals. How to find such a pairing, or define it, is a different issue. But identifying a terrible language should be possible, and thus I would expect we can do better than “everyone’s a winner”. And yes, I can read the literature (give me a minute, gotta ship the book, and probably any existing counterarguments first…), or you could just tell me where my reasoning has failed, since I’ve laid it bare (I’m assuming you’ve read the existing literature, to determine that the answer I seek lies there… you’re not the kind of guy to send me on a wild-goose chase, are you?)

thaumasiotes 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). That is broadly the consensus, with a couple of exceptions: - Writing is not part of the language and doesn't factor into complexity anywhere. Chinese writing is much more complex than the writing system of most other languages, but that's just not relevant to the spoken language. - Some languages are believed to be generally simpler than average due to having gone through a phase involving a large number of adults learning the language. Mandarin is one of those languages, as is English.

renox 5y ago

Uh? Given that I'm French I doubt very much that this is true.. Foreigners learning French have to spend a lot of time learning stupid things such as is-it a she-stone (une pierre) or a he-stone(un caillou)? Knowing where to write an or en when both sounds the same (on-om ai-è-es-est-ê ...), Lots of irregularities also. All these things bring a lot of complexity without any real meaningful gain.. At the opposite a language like Esperanto is really easy to learn..

openknot 5y ago
>All these things bring a lot of complexity without any real meaningful gain.. This assertion doesn't contradict the author's claim that no language is overall more complex than another. The usefulness of the complexity isn't part of the argument. >At the opposite a language like Esperanto is really easy to learn.. Esperanto is a constructed/invented language, deliberately created to reduce complexity. It's implied that the author was comparing the complexity of different languages that evolved naturally.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  Moreover the implied consequence of the "equal complexity" thesis is that over time, were Esperanto to be more widely used as a mother tongue for a large population, it too would collect additional complexity as certain stylistic choices would start hardening into first idiomatic and non-idiomatic language patterns and then further into new grammatical and phonological rules.
  - renox 5y ago
    I'm not so sure: now we have academies which tries to codify language changes..