3 ms·
I asked one of my comp ling profs, who cut their teeth at Bell Labs, about this question. She said that, as spoken, information density is fairly similar from
by ineedasername 5y ago
I asked one of my comp ling profs, who cut their teeth at Bell Labs, about this question.
She said that, as spoken, information density is fairly similar from language to language. Languages that express the same information using more phonemes tend to be spoken using more phonemes per unit of time, and it what (in some circumstances though not all) can contribute to the perception that people speaking in one language speak much faster.
I suppose that might not help much when the issue is writing though, or any circumstance where phonemic production is at a fixed rate regardless of language.
- treeman79 5y agoI think it was 39 bits per second of information. Regardless of language. Languages with denser information are spoken slower. Vice versa. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
- rich_sasha 5y agoI find French full of nuance (=bits of information) and habitually spoken very fast.
- ineedasername 5y agoThanks for the reference to back up my recollection of a lecture, nice to know my memory (and professor) are correct. It was (and is) fascinating to me that there are these sorts of constants.