7 ms·

Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness, It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick

101 points by fbrusch 12y ago

amirmc 12y ago
> "We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a lot about his previous experience or knowledge. After all, one person’s redundancy can be another person’s anomaly..." I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is also the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and check your own assumptions if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than talking past each other (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what was decided).
- cheatsheet 12y ago
  > (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what what decided) Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity. Expect the unexpected, but within a clearly defined range of variability. I'm not talking specifically about software development btw; consider the surrealists or any other artistic or philosophical movement (or literature, music, mathematics etc). People have ideas together, walk away, and then have mental independence. Mental independence is good, because too much binding in thought = paranoia, nervous, control obsessed people. Too little and it seems like people don't care. It's a balance.
  - amirmc 12y ago
    > "Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity." I think you've missed my point. I was mostly referring to things like meetings, where people typically are trying to reach an agreement (or decision) about something. If those people are from different cultures, then a mismatch can arise where people think they're talking about the same thing but only realise later that things have gone wrong. Even then, people tend towards recriminations, rather than root-causing and realising that their terms mean different things. Take the example from the end of the post itself (where 'skiing' meant different things to both people -- if they hadn't clarified, they'd have parted with vastly different views on what was discussed).
    - divegeek 12y ago
      I find it useful to keep in mind the notion that all knowledge is gained by a process of guesswork and criticism. When you listen to my voice or read my words, you must guess at what I mean to convey, because my words by themselves, even if not mumbled, are almost never sufficiently precise to carry my meaning. So instead, you have to build and discard internal explanatory models of my meaning, criticizing them by cross-checking them with other things I've said, and with your understanding of my understanding of the world. Meanwhile, I'm doing the same thing on the other side, hypothesizing the models that you're creating based on what I've said and trying to add more words to fill any gaps in what I presume that you're presuming that I mean. When we arrive at a point where you and I both believe that you hold a consistent mental model of what I wished to convey, then we believe that I have communicated to you. Stated that way, it's clear that communication is really, really hard -- even though we do all of that model building and evaluation without conscious effort in most cases. And it's also quite obvious why it's easier to communicate with people you know well, because both sides have a better mental model of the other's mental model. Both are _wrong_, always, but they're less wrong than similar situations between people with less shared context. This view also makes it abundantly clear that it's important to validate communication. If you restate to me in your own words what you believe I intended to convey, there's a good chance I'll catch any major discrepancies between what I intended and what you got. A good chance, but we can still end up believing that we're in agreement when we're not. In theory it is possible to define a language and communication techniques that do not depend on this iterative, contextualized method. This is essentially what we do in formal languages, such as those we use in mathematics or programming. But it is not how people communicate because it's actually far more efficient to rely on compression via shared context than it is to communicate with formal precision. Further, formal communication only obviates guesswork and criticism at the level of understanding which is directly expressed. I can read an assembler program and understand with perfect precision what the individual instructions do, but the leap to understanding the goal of the program again requires guesswork and criticism. As an aside, it's interesting to note that the process of guess-and-evaluate is essentially the same as the scientific method of hypothesize-and-test and even the same as the evolutionary method of vary-and-select. There's a compelling argument that all knowledge creation occurs via this process -- and communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of the giver.
LordRatte 12y ago
Some people over-compress, though, until the point where the data becomes corrupt and the antivirus (our social attention span) quarantines it as a mild threat.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Reminds me of Scott Aaronson's Umeshisms[0]/Malthusianisms[1]. If you don't sometimes over-compress it means you're compressing too little and there's room for improving efficiency. Also, "Why do native speakers of the language you’re studying talk too fast for you to understand them? Because otherwise, they could talk faster and still understand each other." [0] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40 [1] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418
Kenji 12y ago
The robustness principle comes to mind: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." You can save yourself a headache if you communicate as clearly and accurately as possible. At work, with friends, with a partner. I don't care what mumbling is a sign of, I care about its result. Don't optimize the wrong thing. Just like nobody likes seeing ugly JPEG artifacts, nobody likes to recognize mumbling.
- mjburgess 12y ago
  That implies making a cognitive activity out of a non-cognitive activity and thus defeating the point.
  - civilian 12y ago
    You can make a cognitive activity into a non-cognitive activity with enough repetition and habit.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
kinleyd 12y ago
I knew a guy who mumbled so much you could never understand him. It was really irritating, but also the secret of his success. His job was to liaison with a number of governmental/bureaucratic organisations - involving customs clearance and things like that - and he was incredibly successful. No one knows for sure how exactly he managed it, but a leading school of thought was convinced that it was his mumbling. The bureaucrats just gave him whatever the hell he wanted as quickly as possible so that they could get him out of their offices asap.
a3voices 12y ago
The purpose of speaking is to convey information to another person. As long as you are accomplishing this, your volume, enunciation, tonality, etc. doesn't matter.
- strathmeyer 12y ago
  When people mumble, it seems they aren't properly communicating information to themselves. It can make them seem like a social deviant.
- bengali3 12y ago
  ^
- rottyguy 12y ago
  Funny, I've always thought this as well. Especially with "Grammar" police. I think the human mind is the best mal-formed HTML parser ever written :-)
- cryptophreak 12y ago
  While a strict interpretation of your statement technically evaluates as true, it’s worth noting that volume, enunciation and tonality can themselves carry information which alters the meaning of your communication.
cgtyoder 12y ago
So just a coincidence with today's xkcd? http://xkcd.com/1489/ http://xkcd.com/1489/
zw123456 12y ago
When I was growing up, I had a cousin named Eddie, and he was a "lazy talker" or at least, as I recall, that was the name they had for his speaking style. Eddie would not mumble, he would just not say the whole word. For example (and it is hard to convey here in the written word) he might say "Hi, my name is Eddie and I am a lazy talker" but it would come out "H, m na Edeh, an I lah tak". Again, not capturing it here, but it was not mumbling. I have met other lazy talkers, and they are not mumbling. I think the article was maybe referring to lazy talkers and not mumblers. Mumbling to me denotes an actual corruption of the words, lazy talking is just not saying the whole word completely, which is more like lossy compression while mumbling to me, means a bad Signal to noise ratio, low volume and garbled words.
- segmondy 12y ago
  Americans do that quite often. They use the schwa sound to represent/compress vowels. The schwa sound is a slight uh. So America is pronounced uhMERIKuh, sounds like MERIK, then they link lots of words, so instead of BUS STOP, you will hear BUSTOP. Or instead of "I am going", You will hear, "I'm going", but the I will be compressed to an uh and liked to the m with a y sound. Iyam, "yuhM going" Chances are that's what your cousin was doing but on a less subtle level.
  - evincarofautumn 12y ago
    Unstressed vowels in all dialects of English are generally reduced to schwa, not just American English.
- dbbolton 12y ago
  The reason this sort of speech pattern is still mostly intelligible is that consonants are actually more important clues markers to the listener (as a general rule). For example, you could probably interpret "thuh kwuhck bruhn fuhx juhmps uhvr thuh luhzy dug" quite readily, but not "duh dwid drowd dod dudd oded duh dudy dod". It is true that vowels are sometimes the distinguishing phoneme between minimal pairs, but the reality is that we are quite adept at calibrating ourselves to cope with vowel variation. One example is actually head size, of all things. I won't go into all the psychoacoustics involved (not my area of expertise), but your brain adjusts its expectations for how a given vowel should sound based on the speaker's unique "instrumental" qualities. In other words, you can end up with two very objectively different waveforms that your brain is able to match up without hesitation. A more familiar example is dialects. A Southern American speaker might say "ice", and to a General American speaker, it may sound much more like "ass", but this kind of variation doesn't really lead to the hilarious confusion one might expect. After a quick "scan" of another dialect, we usually adapt fairly quickly, and we retain those "settings" for the next time we hear a similar dialect. One example that's not so easy to work around might be the pen-pin merger. In general, it leads to few mix-ups. But those speakers, "pen" and "pin" are homophones, and unlike other such pairs (bin-Ben, lint-lent, mint-meant, tin[t]-ten[t], win-when, etc.) they may not be easily differentiable by context. In response, many speakers refer to pens as "ink pens" and pins as "stick pins", which avoids the ambiguity (animal pens and female swans aren't really an issue I suppose). So even when vowels lead to genuine ambiguity, we get around it pretty easily.
bgilroy26 12y ago
These aren't different things! If you compress data by saying less, you're expending less energy. It seems like the author is arguing that in order to be lazy about sound production, you need to expend energy picking out which sounds you need and which can be safely left out. That's all well and good, but in the middle of the article, the author herself refers to mumbling as a kind of "strategic laziness"! Curse these headlines!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
woliveirajr 12y ago
Kolmogorov complexity theorem states, in a very naive interpretation, that information is as complex as the ammount of symbols you need to represent it...
surgerunner 12y ago
Compressed data stops being human readable.
mc32 12y ago
So drunkards are better at data compression than the non drunk population? And forget about southerners who speak English as if it were French. Eass for east. Repore for report. Assed for asked, etc. (really you 'assed' me a question?) It can quickly make a conversation ambiguous as this tendency results in lots oh homonyms.
grimmdude 12y ago
I mumble, and I will now send this article to all the people who tell me not to. Thanks
Dirlewanger 12y ago
I hate it. This, txting talk, bastardizing the way we converse with one another, it's all happening so unmanageably sudden that repercussions will take a generation or two to manifest. The Internet doesn't help. I know, I know, each generation loves to make a pastime in being armchair harbingers of doom regarding successive generations, but seriously maiming the way we communicate is on another plane of concern I think. Ok, off my soapbox.
- stephenhuey 12y ago
  There was more variation in language before the courts of Europe began dictating the usage of standard dialects. Languages may have changed even faster in the past than they do now (not counting the vast increase in jargon we have in the modern world). The internet may not have publishing gatekeepers like books have had for centuries, but like books and the courts of yore it probably still does more for encouraging people to use the same language patterns rather than different ones just because it's so accessible. If the movies of Hollywood have influenced the usage of English worldwide, how much more so would YouTube? Long before the internet, multiple Latin American countries started chopping off certain sounds in Spanish words. Although it makes it difficult for other Spanish speakers to understand clearly at first--and they may feel like their language has been maimed, as you put it--the ones doing the chopping seem to communicate quite easily with one another.
  - Dirlewanger 12y ago
    Of course this phenomenon has been happening since language first became a thing, but the rate at which it's happening has not. The most cynical part of me fears that places like courts, government institutions, academia, and other sorts of walled gardens will soon be the only bastions well-written and cogent language (and that this will happen before the end of the century). I don't know...maybe it won't. But still.
    - stephenhuey 12y ago
      I'm no professional linguist, but my understanding is that there is less variation in language now than there was a century or two ago. When travel and communication were more difficult, you did not see speakers across a nation using uniform language patterns as much as they do now. Not only that, numerous languages we had only a century or two ago have been replaced, and some predict "that 90% of the circa 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world will have become extinct by 2050." This is sad to me, as I would prefer the preservation of linguistic diversity. I'm pretty sure you have little reason to expect there will be an increase of nonstandard language patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language#Language_loss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language#Language_loss
chasing 12y ago
Bullshit. You're mumbling when I can't understand you. Calling it "data compression" is polishing an indecipherable turd. Of course people make their language more efficient when using common words and phrases. "D'ja do it?" "Yeah." "K." "No prob." But that's not mumbling. I think of mumbling as generally being an expressed disinterest in being understood. Sometimes because the speaker doesn't understand what they're being asked to speak about, sometimes because they're shy and insecure about their words. Sometimes mumbling is a way to express derision or disinterest in the information or the person someone's speaking to. Lots of reasons. Not clever. Kind of the opposite of clever. It's a time-waster compared to just flat-out saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" or "I don't care" or whatever.
- dbbolton 12y ago
  Sorry to break it to you, but psychosocial behaviors aren't always governed by rationality. Edit: also, "to speak incoherently" and "to fail to articulate" are both acceptable definitions of the word "mumble": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mumble https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mumble
  - mehrzad 12y ago
    Isn't that what the article's title kind of implying though?
    - dbbolton 12y ago
      No. It is describing adaptive aspects of some linguistic phenomena. chasing is suggesting that when a person starts to mumble, which they seemed to define as speaking incoherently due to a variety of psychosocial circumstances- completely different from the article's definition- they are behaving irrationally and wasting time because the rational thing to do would be to directly and clearly state the reason, assuming the speaker is even aware of such a reason, that they began to mumble in the first place.
      - anigbrowl 12y ago
pkinsky 12y ago
People also mumble when they're deliberately talking around something. For example, see this section from the audio recordings that brought down Nixon. There's no doubt that both parties knew exactly what they were referring to and could have expanded on it if needed. It's more clear if you listen to it: they mumble as an obfuscation tactic, likely as an ingrained habit when talking about such matters. http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html >Haldeman: .../only way to solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that…the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC…they did a massive story on the Cuban… >Nixon: That’s right. >Haldeman: thing. >Nixon: Right. >Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an unusual development,… >Nixon: Um huh. >Haldeman: …and, uh, that would take care of it. >Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?
cwbrandsma 12y ago
My father-in-law and one of my daughters are both mumblers. But my father needs hearing aids. Best way to make sure father-in-law speaks up is to have my father around. Downside is it physically wears my father-in-law out. He just can't handle expending that much effort into speaking.
jdeibele 12y ago
I have more trouble understanding what my daughters are saying than my son. My daughters are in Spanish Immersion programs while he's in Japanese. My oldest says that she's just used to using Spanish and that's why her English isn't more clearly enunciated. My son does mumble at times but I've always thought it was when he was saying something he knew he wasn't supposed to.
arrrg 12y ago
Am I completely off base here or is this mumbling equals laziness thing something unique to the English language? I'm German and I really wasn't aware of this association at all. I associate mumbling with shyness … and that's about it. And what's more that association to laziness seems positively weird and non-sensical to me.
mmanfrin 12y ago
I'm a chronic mumbler -- I try not to be, but when I speak, it feels very loud (to me), but comes out quiet and mumbly; when I speak up so friends can hear, it feels like I am yelling. Definitely not about compression, though.
dozy 12y ago
this reminded me of an interesting New Yorker summary of a study on 'filler words' and how our ability to speak and explain efficiently develops: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscientiousness-kidspeak http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscienti...
UhUhUhUh 12y ago
The title is wrong because it can be both and much more. When will we stop using titles as hooks?
kmm 12y ago
I have always liked the noisy-channel model of language. It appeals to me because I think of the human as an extremely good pattern recognition "device". In my opinion, it gives a satisfying explanation as to why many languages (about half of them) divide their words in noun categories or genders, which are rarely sex-based. It's a system of redundancy, which allows for noisy or compressed speech (either mumbled, or at a party, or fast spoken), to still be understood, because the gender endings give clues to what the original word was

101 points by fbrusch 12y ago

> "We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a lot about his previous experience or knowledge. After all, one person’s redundancy can be another person’s anomaly..." I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is also the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and check your own assumptions if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than talking past each other (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what was decided).

cheatsheet 12y ago
> (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what what decided) Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity. Expect the unexpected, but within a clearly defined range of variability. I'm not talking specifically about software development btw; consider the surrealists or any other artistic or philosophical movement (or literature, music, mathematics etc). People have ideas together, walk away, and then have mental independence. Mental independence is good, because too much binding in thought = paranoia, nervous, control obsessed people. Too little and it seems like people don't care. It's a balance.
- amirmc 12y ago
  > "Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity." I think you've missed my point. I was mostly referring to things like meetings, where people typically are trying to reach an agreement (or decision) about something. If those people are from different cultures, then a mismatch can arise where people think they're talking about the same thing but only realise later that things have gone wrong. Even then, people tend towards recriminations, rather than root-causing and realising that their terms mean different things. Take the example from the end of the post itself (where 'skiing' meant different things to both people -- if they hadn't clarified, they'd have parted with vastly different views on what was discussed).
  - divegeek 12y ago
    I find it useful to keep in mind the notion that all knowledge is gained by a process of guesswork and criticism. When you listen to my voice or read my words, you must guess at what I mean to convey, because my words by themselves, even if not mumbled, are almost never sufficiently precise to carry my meaning. So instead, you have to build and discard internal explanatory models of my meaning, criticizing them by cross-checking them with other things I've said, and with your understanding of my understanding of the world. Meanwhile, I'm doing the same thing on the other side, hypothesizing the models that you're creating based on what I've said and trying to add more words to fill any gaps in what I presume that you're presuming that I mean. When we arrive at a point where you and I both believe that you hold a consistent mental model of what I wished to convey, then we believe that I have communicated to you. Stated that way, it's clear that communication is really, really hard -- even though we do all of that model building and evaluation without conscious effort in most cases. And it's also quite obvious why it's easier to communicate with people you know well, because both sides have a better mental model of the other's mental model. Both are _wrong_, always, but they're less wrong than similar situations between people with less shared context. This view also makes it abundantly clear that it's important to validate communication. If you restate to me in your own words what you believe I intended to convey, there's a good chance I'll catch any major discrepancies between what I intended and what you got. A good chance, but we can still end up believing that we're in agreement when we're not. In theory it is possible to define a language and communication techniques that do not depend on this iterative, contextualized method. This is essentially what we do in formal languages, such as those we use in mathematics or programming. But it is not how people communicate because it's actually far more efficient to rely on compression via shared context than it is to communicate with formal precision. Further, formal communication only obviates guesswork and criticism at the level of understanding which is directly expressed. I can read an assembler program and understand with perfect precision what the individual instructions do, but the leap to understanding the goal of the program again requires guesswork and criticism. As an aside, it's interesting to note that the process of guess-and-evaluate is essentially the same as the scientific method of hypothesize-and-test and even the same as the evolutionary method of vary-and-select. There's a compelling argument that all knowledge creation occurs via this process -- and communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of the giver.

LordRatte 12y ago

Some people over-compress, though, until the point where the data becomes corrupt and the antivirus (our social attention span) quarantines it as a mild threat.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Reminds me of Scott Aaronson's Umeshisms[0]/Malthusianisms[1]. If you don't sometimes over-compress it means you're compressing too little and there's room for improving efficiency. Also, "Why do native speakers of the language you’re studying talk too fast for you to understand them? Because otherwise, they could talk faster and still understand each other." [0] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40 [1] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

Kenji 12y ago

The robustness principle comes to mind: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." You can save yourself a headache if you communicate as clearly and accurately as possible. At work, with friends, with a partner. I don't care what mumbling is a sign of, I care about its result. Don't optimize the wrong thing. Just like nobody likes seeing ugly JPEG artifacts, nobody likes to recognize mumbling.

mjburgess 12y ago
That implies making a cognitive activity out of a non-cognitive activity and thus defeating the point.
- civilian 12y ago
  You can make a cognitive activity into a non-cognitive activity with enough repetition and habit.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

kinleyd 12y ago

I knew a guy who mumbled so much you could never understand him. It was really irritating, but also the secret of his success. His job was to liaison with a number of governmental/bureaucratic organisations - involving customs clearance and things like that - and he was incredibly successful. No one knows for sure how exactly he managed it, but a leading school of thought was convinced that it was his mumbling. The bureaucrats just gave him whatever the hell he wanted as quickly as possible so that they could get him out of their offices asap.

a3voices 12y ago

The purpose of speaking is to convey information to another person. As long as you are accomplishing this, your volume, enunciation, tonality, etc. doesn't matter.

strathmeyer 12y ago
When people mumble, it seems they aren't properly communicating information to themselves. It can make them seem like a social deviant.
bengali3 12y ago
^
rottyguy 12y ago
Funny, I've always thought this as well. Especially with "Grammar" police. I think the human mind is the best mal-formed HTML parser ever written :-)
cryptophreak 12y ago
While a strict interpretation of your statement technically evaluates as true, it’s worth noting that volume, enunciation and tonality can themselves carry information which alters the meaning of your communication.

cgtyoder 12y ago

So just a coincidence with today's xkcd? http://xkcd.com/1489/ http://xkcd.com/1489/

zw123456 12y ago

When I was growing up, I had a cousin named Eddie, and he was a "lazy talker" or at least, as I recall, that was the name they had for his speaking style. Eddie would not mumble, he would just not say the whole word. For example (and it is hard to convey here in the written word) he might say "Hi, my name is Eddie and I am a lazy talker" but it would come out "H, m na Edeh, an I lah tak". Again, not capturing it here, but it was not mumbling. I have met other lazy talkers, and they are not mumbling. I think the article was maybe referring to lazy talkers and not mumblers. Mumbling to me denotes an actual corruption of the words, lazy talking is just not saying the whole word completely, which is more like lossy compression while mumbling to me, means a bad Signal to noise ratio, low volume and garbled words.

segmondy 12y ago
Americans do that quite often. They use the schwa sound to represent/compress vowels. The schwa sound is a slight uh. So America is pronounced uhMERIKuh, sounds like MERIK, then they link lots of words, so instead of BUS STOP, you will hear BUSTOP. Or instead of "I am going", You will hear, "I'm going", but the I will be compressed to an uh and liked to the m with a y sound. Iyam, "yuhM going" Chances are that's what your cousin was doing but on a less subtle level.
- evincarofautumn 12y ago
  Unstressed vowels in all dialects of English are generally reduced to schwa, not just American English.
dbbolton 12y ago
The reason this sort of speech pattern is still mostly intelligible is that consonants are actually more important clues markers to the listener (as a general rule). For example, you could probably interpret "thuh kwuhck bruhn fuhx juhmps uhvr thuh luhzy dug" quite readily, but not "duh dwid drowd dod dudd oded duh dudy dod". It is true that vowels are sometimes the distinguishing phoneme between minimal pairs, but the reality is that we are quite adept at calibrating ourselves to cope with vowel variation. One example is actually head size, of all things. I won't go into all the psychoacoustics involved (not my area of expertise), but your brain adjusts its expectations for how a given vowel should sound based on the speaker's unique "instrumental" qualities. In other words, you can end up with two very objectively different waveforms that your brain is able to match up without hesitation. A more familiar example is dialects. A Southern American speaker might say "ice", and to a General American speaker, it may sound much more like "ass", but this kind of variation doesn't really lead to the hilarious confusion one might expect. After a quick "scan" of another dialect, we usually adapt fairly quickly, and we retain those "settings" for the next time we hear a similar dialect. One example that's not so easy to work around might be the pen-pin merger. In general, it leads to few mix-ups. But those speakers, "pen" and "pin" are homophones, and unlike other such pairs (bin-Ben, lint-lent, mint-meant, tin[t]-ten[t], win-when, etc.) they may not be easily differentiable by context. In response, many speakers refer to pens as "ink pens" and pins as "stick pins", which avoids the ambiguity (animal pens and female swans aren't really an issue I suppose). So even when vowels lead to genuine ambiguity, we get around it pretty easily.

bgilroy26 12y ago

These aren't different things! If you compress data by saying less, you're expending less energy. It seems like the author is arguing that in order to be lazy about sound production, you need to expend energy picking out which sounds you need and which can be safely left out. That's all well and good, but in the middle of the article, the author herself refers to mumbling as a kind of "strategic laziness"! Curse these headlines!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

woliveirajr 12y ago

Kolmogorov complexity theorem states, in a very naive interpretation, that information is as complex as the ammount of symbols you need to represent it...

surgerunner 12y ago

Compressed data stops being human readable.

mc32 12y ago

So drunkards are better at data compression than the non drunk population? And forget about southerners who speak English as if it were French. Eass for east. Repore for report. Assed for asked, etc. (really you 'assed' me a question?) It can quickly make a conversation ambiguous as this tendency results in lots oh homonyms.

grimmdude 12y ago

I mumble, and I will now send this article to all the people who tell me not to. Thanks

Dirlewanger 12y ago

I hate it. This, txting talk, bastardizing the way we converse with one another, it's all happening so unmanageably sudden that repercussions will take a generation or two to manifest. The Internet doesn't help. I know, I know, each generation loves to make a pastime in being armchair harbingers of doom regarding successive generations, but seriously maiming the way we communicate is on another plane of concern I think. Ok, off my soapbox.

stephenhuey 12y ago
There was more variation in language before the courts of Europe began dictating the usage of standard dialects. Languages may have changed even faster in the past than they do now (not counting the vast increase in jargon we have in the modern world). The internet may not have publishing gatekeepers like books have had for centuries, but like books and the courts of yore it probably still does more for encouraging people to use the same language patterns rather than different ones just because it's so accessible. If the movies of Hollywood have influenced the usage of English worldwide, how much more so would YouTube? Long before the internet, multiple Latin American countries started chopping off certain sounds in Spanish words. Although it makes it difficult for other Spanish speakers to understand clearly at first--and they may feel like their language has been maimed, as you put it--the ones doing the chopping seem to communicate quite easily with one another.
- Dirlewanger 12y ago
  Of course this phenomenon has been happening since language first became a thing, but the rate at which it's happening has not. The most cynical part of me fears that places like courts, government institutions, academia, and other sorts of walled gardens will soon be the only bastions well-written and cogent language (and that this will happen before the end of the century). I don't know...maybe it won't. But still.
  - stephenhuey 12y ago
    I'm no professional linguist, but my understanding is that there is less variation in language now than there was a century or two ago. When travel and communication were more difficult, you did not see speakers across a nation using uniform language patterns as much as they do now. Not only that, numerous languages we had only a century or two ago have been replaced, and some predict "that 90% of the circa 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world will have become extinct by 2050." This is sad to me, as I would prefer the preservation of linguistic diversity. I'm pretty sure you have little reason to expect there will be an increase of nonstandard language patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language#Language_loss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language#Language_loss

chasing 12y ago

Bullshit. You're mumbling when I can't understand you. Calling it "data compression" is polishing an indecipherable turd. Of course people make their language more efficient when using common words and phrases. "D'ja do it?" "Yeah." "K." "No prob." But that's not mumbling. I think of mumbling as generally being an expressed disinterest in being understood. Sometimes because the speaker doesn't understand what they're being asked to speak about, sometimes because they're shy and insecure about their words. Sometimes mumbling is a way to express derision or disinterest in the information or the person someone's speaking to. Lots of reasons. Not clever. Kind of the opposite of clever. It's a time-waster compared to just flat-out saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" or "I don't care" or whatever.

dbbolton 12y ago
Sorry to break it to you, but psychosocial behaviors aren't always governed by rationality. Edit: also, "to speak incoherently" and "to fail to articulate" are both acceptable definitions of the word "mumble": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mumble https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mumble
- mehrzad 12y ago
  Isn't that what the article's title kind of implying though?
  - dbbolton 12y ago
    No. It is describing adaptive aspects of some linguistic phenomena. chasing is suggesting that when a person starts to mumble, which they seemed to define as speaking incoherently due to a variety of psychosocial circumstances- completely different from the article's definition- they are behaving irrationally and wasting time because the rational thing to do would be to directly and clearly state the reason, assuming the speaker is even aware of such a reason, that they began to mumble in the first place.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago

pkinsky 12y ago

People also mumble when they're deliberately talking around something. For example, see this section from the audio recordings that brought down Nixon. There's no doubt that both parties knew exactly what they were referring to and could have expanded on it if needed. It's more clear if you listen to it: they mumble as an obfuscation tactic, likely as an ingrained habit when talking about such matters. http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html >Haldeman: .../only way to solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that…the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC…they did a massive story on the Cuban… >Nixon: That’s right. >Haldeman: thing. >Nixon: Right. >Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an unusual development,… >Nixon: Um huh. >Haldeman: …and, uh, that would take care of it. >Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?

cwbrandsma 12y ago

My father-in-law and one of my daughters are both mumblers. But my father needs hearing aids. Best way to make sure father-in-law speaks up is to have my father around. Downside is it physically wears my father-in-law out. He just can't handle expending that much effort into speaking.

jdeibele 12y ago

I have more trouble understanding what my daughters are saying than my son. My daughters are in Spanish Immersion programs while he's in Japanese. My oldest says that she's just used to using Spanish and that's why her English isn't more clearly enunciated. My son does mumble at times but I've always thought it was when he was saying something he knew he wasn't supposed to.

arrrg 12y ago

Am I completely off base here or is this mumbling equals laziness thing something unique to the English language? I'm German and I really wasn't aware of this association at all. I associate mumbling with shyness … and that's about it. And what's more that association to laziness seems positively weird and non-sensical to me.

mmanfrin 12y ago

I'm a chronic mumbler -- I try not to be, but when I speak, it feels very loud (to me), but comes out quiet and mumbly; when I speak up so friends can hear, it feels like I am yelling. Definitely not about compression, though.

dozy 12y ago

this reminded me of an interesting New Yorker summary of a study on 'filler words' and how our ability to speak and explain efficiently develops: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscientiousness-kidspeak http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscienti...

UhUhUhUh 12y ago

The title is wrong because it can be both and much more. When will we stop using titles as hooks?

kmm 12y ago

I have always liked the noisy-channel model of language. It appeals to me because I think of the human as an extremely good pattern recognition "device". In my opinion, it gives a satisfying explanation as to why many languages (about half of them) divide their words in noun categories or genders, which are rarely sex-based. It's a system of redundancy, which allows for noisy or compressed speech (either mumbled, or at a party, or fast spoken), to still be understood, because the gender endings give clues to what the original word was