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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me that there's room for improvement in this article. For example, the author does not try to compress any written language samples. If you wanted to find a "most efficient" language, you'd compress samples, maybe normalize them with the uncompressed length because it's hard to get the same thing written in different languages. My guess would be that natural languages would compress quite a bit, with English close to the least compressible. Artificial languages like Ithkuil and FORTRAN would be much more compressible, putting lie to Dembski's assertion that "natural" information is more likely to be incompressible.

EDIT: I think English would be least compressible. But I suspect that all written languages would compress quite a bit.

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Why do you think English would be least compressible? Is that based on conjecture or have you investigated this? Why would artificial language be more compressible? That seems completely orthogonal to me (by definition, an artificial language can be designed with whatever properties you choose). Fortran may be more compressible due to its limited set of keywords, but it's my impression that Ithkuil is by design more information dense and thus harder to compress than English.

The most efficient language is the least compressible language only in a narrow and arbitrary sense of efficient. There are many considerations such as what is efficient for the speaker, the hearer, redundancy to noise, efficiency with respect to particular purposes, etc. We can assume that natural languages will generally make a good trade-off across these factors, and searching for the most efficient language in one particular narrow sense is not very useful. Moreover, compression of text focuses only on surface form, completely ignoring the dimension of meaning.

I live in the USA. We get labels in English, French and Spanish so that products can be sold in Canada and Mexico. The English labeling is almost always visibly shorter than the French and Spanish. So I hypothesize that English would compress less.

My conjecture is that artificial languages will be more compressible because they haven't had time to get honed down, like English losing "thee" and "thou", that personal mode of address. Esperanto and Loglan are completely regular, which natural languages are not, and thus has a lot of use-cases where the regularity doesn't matter - they haven't had time to lose the mostly-unused features.

For better or for worse, compression of text only uses the surface form to compress, because that's the level that compression works on - letters or bytes or some other unit. You can't compress meaning. Meaning doesn't exist per se: colorless dreams sleep furiously, after all. That is, you can use perfectly sensible words and letters and even legitimate syntax, and still create strings devoid of meaning. A document consisting of perfectly spelled words, and legitimate syntax, yet without meaning like the colorless dreams sentence, will compress identically to ordinary text with the same orthographic and syntactical validity.

> If you wanted to find a "most efficient" language, you'd compress samples, maybe normalize them with the uncompressed length because it's hard to get the same thing written in different languages.

It's been generally done, just by determining how many syllables are necessary to express an idea; it also turns out to be pretty easy to measure IIRC, because people express ideas at a constant rate across cultures, so if you speak a less efficient language, you speak faster, and if you speak a more efficient language, you speak slower.

Romance languages aren't very efficient; English is pretty efficient, and again IIRC, the most efficient common language is Vietnamese, which can express ideas in about 2/3 of the verbiage that English needs.

How does Vietnamese manage to eliminate that much redundancy? What parts of language have they done away with?

You could compress the written language in UTF-8 or the IPA version of the languages words and potentially get very different results. Also, languages tend to be spoken at about the same bitrate even though they may have different numbers of bits per syllable. Spanish and Japanese, limited to pure vowel sounds and neither tending to pile up the consonants, tend to have less information per syllable but be spoken rapidly. English, with its diverse vowels and relatively consonant-rich syllables, and Chinese, with its medium number of phonemes but added layer of tones, tend to be spoken more slowly.

The author of the article would have been wise to include this information.

I did find "Clustering by Compression", https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0312044

The emphasis in this paper was not on "efficiency", but rather on phylogenetic grouping. The authors used the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", which apparently has 52 translations as the subject text. See Fig 13 and section 5.2 for details. Instead of just compressing and normalizing, they developed a normalized compression distance, which involves concatenating two texts, compression, and division by the largest of the two texts, as compressed alone.

I think that using the same encoding of all the languages and some kind of normalizing would wash the results of differences due to encodings.

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