>I consider it near to an optima for encoding English in particular. A different spoken language, which might carry a different amount of bits per symbol, would

>I consider it near to an optima for encoding English in particular. A different spoken language, which might carry a different amount of bits per symbol, would be best encoded by a different writing system. I'm sure Cyrillic is near optimal for encoding Russian. I don't know enough to tell you how to break Cyrillic into k segments and still have it be recognizable, but it can probably be done. I'm getting confused. At first you made this about written alphabets, but now you somehow relate this to information in the spoken language. The thing is, spoken language contains significantly more information than 26 letters. There are a number of sounds which are associated with combinations of letters e.g. "th". I have to agree with what someone else said further down the thread, this seems to be much like numerology after the fact that someone engineered 7 segment displays to represent ASCII characters.