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The information density of Chinese characters is enormous compared to English. This becomes very obvious when you find yourself trying to say something in just

by fenomas 12y ago

The information density of Chinese characters is enormous compared to English. This becomes very obvious when you find yourself trying to say something in just 140 characters. ;)

wodenokoto 12y ago
Is the information density measured in bits and bytes still higher?
- fenomas 12y ago
  Way higher. Partly due to the writing and partly due to grammar. Isolated concepts tend to use two Chinese characters, or 4 bytes, which is typically denser than English already. But on top of that English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.
  - burtonlang 12y ago
    >English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that. I admit that I only got as far as Mandarin I in school, but it seems to me that the existence of classifiers in Chinese languages contradicts that.
- kijin 12y ago
  Universal Declaration of Human Rights: English raw text: 11KB Chinese raw text: 8.8KB (UTF-8), 6KB (GB18030) English compressed with xz: 3.8KB Chinese compressed with xz: 3.7KB (UTF-8), 3.3KB (GB18030) Yes, the information density does seem to be a bit higher in Chinese. Which, of course, is obtained at the cost of an encoding algorithm (writing system) that is more difficult to implement (learn), encode (write), and decode (read). It's the typical tradeoff between processing efficiency and memory consumption. I wonder how much time it takes for the average American to type or handwrite the UDHR in English, versus the average Chinese to type or handwrite the same document in Chinese. After all, hard drives are cheap today. Human brain processing power is not.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    Just to point out, using UTF-8 to examine the informational properties of Chinese text is absurd. All Chinese characters are three bytes in UTF-8, and there's no reason to use it over GB, where they're two bytes. UTF-8 would only make sense if you wanted to have a document with stretches of, say, English, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese text all together. I can't provide much in the way of authentic information as to your last question, but anecdotally I find it easier to finger-type Chinese into my phone than English. A couple factors are at work: - I don't adjust my style for the phone, and it's next to worthless at predicting what I want to say (in English). This leads to a lot of thumb-tiring selection of single letters. - I don't speak fluent Chinese, so most of what I say is pretty basic stuff, which the predictive input has an easy time with. This leads into the third point, - Using a pinyin input method, you can call up entire phrases by just putting in the first letter of each syllable, e.g. xx for 谢谢 or bhys for 不好意思 or ng for 那个. This is basically the equivalent of your computer automatically expanding IANAL into "I'm not a lawyer" whenever you type it in, except, for everything. (This is also true for typing on a computer, but I'm comfortable enough on a keyboard that I don't have problems typing English.)
    - kijin 12y ago
      > using UTF-8 to examine the informational properties of Chinese text is absurd. By the same reasoning, using 8-bit ASCII to examine the informational properties of English text is also absurd. English can be comfortably expressed with only 6 bits per character, after all. Anyway, I did include a GB-encoded version in my calculations. And once you compress the text, the charset-related difference becomes much smaller anyway.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        Agreed. In fact, I'll go farther and say I misspoke, raising the objection you rightly criticize when it would make more sense to object to using UTF-8 to compare english text to chinese text. I have no issues with your comment, though, and I agree that under compression is the correct place to make the comparison. It's faintly aggravating to me that the same text compresses differently according to the intermediate encoding, but that's between me and the universe. English can be comfortably expressed in 5 bits per character, using 26 letters and the five symbols [. ',"] . Capitalization and numeric digits are nice-to-haves. ;)
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
A character is more like a word though. I really get screwed when I have to fill out a bilingual form and they want me to describe something in N characters (which it says in both English AND Chinese...doh!). This is just bias against us laowai!

by fenomas 12y ago

The information density of Chinese characters is enormous compared to English. This becomes very obvious when you find yourself trying to say something in just 140 characters. ;)

wodenokoto 12y ago

Is the information density measured in bits and bytes still higher?

fenomas 12y ago
Way higher. Partly due to the writing and partly due to grammar. Isolated concepts tend to use two Chinese characters, or 4 bytes, which is typically denser than English already. But on top of that English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.
- burtonlang 12y ago
  >English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that. I admit that I only got as far as Mandarin I in school, but it seems to me that the existence of classifiers in Chinese languages contradicts that.
kijin 12y ago
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: English raw text: 11KB Chinese raw text: 8.8KB (UTF-8), 6KB (GB18030) English compressed with xz: 3.8KB Chinese compressed with xz: 3.7KB (UTF-8), 3.3KB (GB18030) Yes, the information density does seem to be a bit higher in Chinese. Which, of course, is obtained at the cost of an encoding algorithm (writing system) that is more difficult to implement (learn), encode (write), and decode (read). It's the typical tradeoff between processing efficiency and memory consumption. I wonder how much time it takes for the average American to type or handwrite the UDHR in English, versus the average Chinese to type or handwrite the same document in Chinese. After all, hard drives are cheap today. Human brain processing power is not.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Just to point out, using UTF-8 to examine the informational properties of Chinese text is absurd. All Chinese characters are three bytes in UTF-8, and there's no reason to use it over GB, where they're two bytes. UTF-8 would only make sense if you wanted to have a document with stretches of, say, English, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese text all together. I can't provide much in the way of authentic information as to your last question, but anecdotally I find it easier to finger-type Chinese into my phone than English. A couple factors are at work: - I don't adjust my style for the phone, and it's next to worthless at predicting what I want to say (in English). This leads to a lot of thumb-tiring selection of single letters. - I don't speak fluent Chinese, so most of what I say is pretty basic stuff, which the predictive input has an easy time with. This leads into the third point, - Using a pinyin input method, you can call up entire phrases by just putting in the first letter of each syllable, e.g. xx for 谢谢 or bhys for 不好意思 or ng for 那个. This is basically the equivalent of your computer automatically expanding IANAL into "I'm not a lawyer" whenever you type it in, except, for everything. (This is also true for typing on a computer, but I'm comfortable enough on a keyboard that I don't have problems typing English.)
  - kijin 12y ago
    > using UTF-8 to examine the informational properties of Chinese text is absurd. By the same reasoning, using 8-bit ASCII to examine the informational properties of English text is also absurd. English can be comfortably expressed with only 6 bits per character, after all. Anyway, I did include a GB-encoded version in my calculations. And once you compress the text, the charset-related difference becomes much smaller anyway.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Agreed. In fact, I'll go farther and say I misspoke, raising the objection you rightly criticize when it would make more sense to object to using UTF-8 to compare english text to chinese text. I have no issues with your comment, though, and I agree that under compression is the correct place to make the comparison. It's faintly aggravating to me that the same text compresses differently according to the intermediate encoding, but that's between me and the universe. English can be comfortably expressed in 5 bits per character, using 26 letters and the five symbols [. ',"] . Capitalization and numeric digits are nice-to-haves. ;)

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

A character is more like a word though. I really get screwed when I have to fill out a bilingual form and they want me to describe something in N characters (which it says in both English AND Chinese...doh!). This is just bias against us laowai!