Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others
time.com
time.com
You'd expect that a language with greater information density would lead to higher rates of transmission error but people here don't seem to have any more trouble understanding each other on the phone or in noisy environments than we do in English.
I don't speak Vietnamese, so can't comment directly with that, but I can relate to my experiences in watching public Australian English simplify massively over the past 20 years or so. The wider public take a lot of cues from the media. Soundbite journalism be damned.
hrm
a classic example of implied (but not really) is cockney rhyming slang
... but really it's about reading between the lines. I can recall the point when I realised that the 'old way' of implied speech was dead in public discourse with this article
http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty...
It's not going to make a lot of sense out of context. In context, it was an article that came out when a superstar athlete in swimming, a national hero, announced his retirement, and the media pundits were basically of the opinion that he was somehow being a traitor to Australia.
This article is lampooning the slavering media, not the athlete. To someone brought up with classic Australian English (similar in nuance to British), it's blisteringly obvious what this article is getting at by halfway through the second sentence. As in, 'it's not worth pointing out' obvious. I thought the article was tedious and waaaaay too long, but the premise was funny.
What was scary was that only about 10% of the people commenting understood what the article was about - the rest completely missed the point, thinking that this was another article calling the athlete a traitor, and rushing to his defense. The article was actually saying "leave the athlete alone, damn the media are reactionary idiots".
Like I said, you'll read it now and it'll probably seem more obvious out of context.
Examples are kind of hard to come up with off the cuff, so what other examples... When we first started watching 30 Rock, we were fairly puzzled and joked that "surely this doesn't have American writers" due to the high amount of innuendo and unpsoken communication in it; jokes that are woven into discourse without having to be focused on and made obvious.
Compare to the more frequent style of US TV, my classic example of a Friends episode where the joke is "Books are so expensive, if only there was a place you could borrow them, and give them back when you're finished!", which gets a dirty look from character B. Joke made, move on. Nope, character B has to say "There is, it's called a library". That kind of punchline being eviscerated from a joke and laid out on a plate is anaethema to British comedy.
I also find it more difficult to speak in metaphor with an American audience, who usually take a much more literal interpretation of what's being said (of course, it varies considerably among Americans - New Englanders seem to understand this kind of speech much more easily).
I do agree that British English speakers are more reticent, but in something of a different way. I spent three months going coast to coast in the US and one thing I loved about it was that Americans just talk to strangers in a way you don't get in other English-speaking countries. Random people walking in the same direction or on the same public bus would just start talking and you'd end up with a good conversation out of it. That rarely happens here.
I've probably waffled on enough at this point (I'm a little drunk), so perhaps best leave it there :)
NOTE: I hate the way HN expires internal links. What, am I going to maliciously link to this reply page? Just because the above took a while to write in this little box shouldn't mean I should run the risk of having to lose a comment I spent some time on. Luckily this time I had it in pageback, but I've lost other comments on other browsers. The point of proscribing pondered (perhaps ponderous?) positations is perfectly puzzling, I put forth. Pshaw!
I suspect it's related to the extremely strict and ridged hierarchies in China, and the extremely flexible and implicit social networks. Your boss doesn't ask you to do a favor. They order you. In contrast, you don't ask your neighbour if you can borrow a cup or sugar, you just take it, and pay back the favor some other time. If they don't let you (and don't have a good reason), you just never talk to them again (or if that's too severe, silently downgrade your relationship with them).
Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese. i.e. "My mother made me do my homework, then she made me watch TV".
I think it is 让.
In Mandarin, the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same phoneme with different intonation. To my untrained ear, they both sound like "my" -- but they mean opposites.
So you ask someone how do you say big. How do you say gigantic, how do you say long, how do you say capacious, etc. It's all "da" ”大“。
So when people come to me in English and say something like you know, capricious is not exactly the same as whimsical, I can say, that's only because you think it can't be. But it can be. It only is because we've integrated words from French, Latin, Scandinavian, etc. which give us the breadth of choice. But it's kind of artificial anyway and if you force yourself to think about basic meanings -there is little difference. (Law excluded).
Example:
Japanese for mouth 口 = 1 "character" English = 5 charachters
The syllables are irrelevant, though above they match; twitter care about characters.
Also note the:
> "Slightly related"
How is 5.6 "more or less identical amount of information" as 3.8? That's a 47% difference!
First the article claims that 1 is set arbitrarily to Vietnamese for the value of information density. There are many common ways to normalize measurements, it is obviously not 1/SPSvietnamese for this case. There are most likely other considered factors in the information density calculation (whose unit we don't actually know btw... but it is presented as a ratio otherwise they wouldn't normalize to 1), or they could just be doing some other statistical funging.
Second: With a little bit of thinking you could realize that you aren't getting a good scientifically sound write-up from the Time article -- mostly because this is how they present things (consumable for the masses!). The article writer could be picking completely arbitrary measures as important for people to puzzle over and say "Wow!" at and ignoring the real results. It has happened countless times in the past and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Basically what I am saying: if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first.
Didn't I just do that? You seem to assume I am incredulous about the paper whereas I commented on the article.
1 cm left 4 cm up
If you drop '4 cm up' you go from a 2D to a 1D but replace up with blue does not mean anything.
The conclusion of the article (that all languages transmit data at the same rate) is supported by the research, but not proved by it. I suspect that if you read the paper, the researchers wouldn't make it sound so conclusive.
People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounce tones correctly. IMO, getting the vowels and consonants right is harder (and more important).
Seriously, here's the pairs you will confuse:
d / t - d is unaspirated
j / zh - j is a "cjsch" sound (a bit like "Asia") while zh is a "j" sound
q / ch - q is a "bright" (slightly whistled?) ch; ch is a "dark" ch)
x / sh - x is a "bright" sh and sh is a "dark" sh
c / s - c is a "ts", s is just s
b / p - b can sound a little closer to p than in English and p is more aspirated
g / k - g sounds a little close to k, while k is more aspirated
Then there's the vowels, which are really hard. Learning four tones is comparatively easy.
If you don't get the consonants almost 100% correct, people will simply not be able to tell what you are saying. If you don't use tones, they can usually understand, as long as you use simple words (which face it, you will).
This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors:
1) the general poor quality of western Mandarin education, which allows foreigners to get by without properly learning tones because teachers are too nice to say anything about it,
2) The idea that Mandarin and English are massively and irreconcilably different has led to general ignorance about the language, which in turn leads to amateur-level hacks becoming "experts" by merely knowing more than the absolute minimum about the language, and
3) general politeness shown to foreigners in large Chinese tourist destinations.
Once you get beyond novelty party Chinese, you realize that to be properly understood it is absolutely imperative that your tones are correct. Or, barring that, that you make an effort. And even then it requires greater effort from the hearer to run through the often massive number of possibilities to find the correct utterance.
Please, if you are considering learning Mandarin, don't listen to anyone who tells you that tones do not matter. The above post betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the language is spoken.
"Do not listen to this person."
Please tone down a bit.
Moreover, I agree with grand-parent: tones should not be held as the most important part when studying Mandarin. It is not.
Tones are completely different from one part of China to the other. In Sichuanhua, a horse is MA4 (down), while it is MA3 (down-up) in Beijinghua and in Putonghua. Quite the opposite. Beside these differences, Sichuanese can be understood in Beijing.
I have been 8 years in China, I work in a Chinese company, I listen, speak, read and write Chinese (not perfectly, but good enough). I never cared that much about tones. I cared about understanding what is said and being understood.
Having enough vocab is the main issue. Knowing the different syntactic sugars used in Mandarin is another. Perfect pronunciation of Putonghua tones is of much lower importance.
The thing is, subtitles are everywhere in China (Watch any movie or newscast), because it is difficult if not impossible to understand dialect speakers, and beyond that, to understand the non-standard mandarin that has been influenced by the these dialects.
The problem with the sentiment "I can get by just fine without tones"(obvious paraphrase) is that "get by just fine" and "without tones" are both statements that need further qualification.
I maintain my central point: Tones are obviously important in a tonal language, and the extent you can be understood without using them is determined almost entirely by the skill of the listener, as well as their acquaintance with other non-standard speakers and/or foreigners.
The reason for my tone in these posts is that I think this sort of attitude speaks badly for all foreigners studying Chinese. It betrays a sort of borderline arrogant exceptionalism that says "I can learn Your language, but on my terms. And in English, there are no tones". The reality is that Chinese speakers have come to expect very little from foreigners who are studying their language...and ironically this just continues the cycle, and these cocksure foreigners receive affirmation for simple, atonal phrases that native speakers must work hard to understand.
There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract:
'''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''
It's interesting that while the Japanese have such a focus on efficiency, their spoken and written language is potentially more contrary to this value than any other language out there.
The article claims less information is encoded in each syllable, not more (as would be expected if more syllables were available).
The Japanese syllabaric alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are larger than the roman alphabet, but the smaller alphabet doesn't mean that Japanese has more syllables than English. English syllables are written using multiple roman letters, and there are far more combinations possible than in hiragana or katakana (hiragana and katakana do allow small letters written between characters to modify the syllables represented, but even taking this into account, there are far more syllables possible when writing English).
On top of this, written hiragana or katakana maps unambiguously to the spoken language, but with English, there is more than one possible pronunciation for many character sequences, and the speaker often needs to know the word and sometimes even how it fits into the sentence to know which of several possible syllables to pronounce.
One thing the article doesn't mention but the paper goes into is the syllabic complexity. Vietnamese and Chinese both have a ridiculous amount of tones (from a Western perspective). From the paper:
Language Syllable Set Weighted Syllabic Complexity
English 7,931 2.48
French 5,646 2.21
German 4,207 2.68
Italian 2,719 2.30
Japanese 416 1.93
Mandarin 1,191 3.58
Spanish 1,593 2.4
From my experience with Japanese, it seems like it has evolved to compensate for the low density:
A lot of the pronouns (I/he/she) tend to be dropped and assumed from context
Some verb forms take the place of longer phrases: taberu koto ga dekimasu->taberaremasu
In spoken/casual usage, many phrases are shortened: oiteoite -> oitoite, my personal favorites are the arigato gozaimasu-> mumble-zaimasu or the irrashaimase->mumble-mase
Maybe a better example of ~teoite->~toite shortening is aketeoite (proper, 6 syllables), meaning open it (for some future purpose) -> aketoite (spoken/casual, 5 syllables)?
Less information is space x and equal time to convey information = seemingly faster speech. Fairly intuitive.
This is true in probably ~99% of cases, but not all.
The study of Linguistics, explicitly, does not deal with orthography, or the written system of languages. There are of course exceptions with good reasons, but orthography systems are rarely, if ever, good representations of the systems of auditory communication that are formally considered languages. An orthography system can be heavily influenced by geopolitics (Chinese), have severe ambiguities (Arabic, the various Latin alphabet systems), or have been created retroactively (many languages of indigenous peoples). While it is convenient to map a spoken language to its related orthography when discussing topics such as syllables, inflection, and morphology, it is rarely appropriate when studying linguistics formally.
As for Japanese, while it is true that its alphabet system has a relatively straightforward mapping to its phonology, the mapping itself is, unfortunately, not unambiguous. Japanese has a tonal system[1] that is not explicit in its orthography. There are examples of phonemically distinct words that are identical when written in hiragana/katakana.
Finally, there exists a moraic system[2] which sits between the phonemic and syllabic abstractions. Japanese, especially, have many phenomenons that cannot be adequately modelled unless working in this in-between system.
I'd be interested to see a larger sample of languages, that is, is there a language in which the decrease of either density or speed isn't combined with an increase of the other. (or the opposite) Or are humans all naturally predisposed to generate/accept information at a similar rate?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/
"The reading rates were about 385 equivalent words per minute for Chinese and 380 words per minute for English for the same scientific textual material (Table 1)"
Probably worth digging more to see if the consensus has changed since then. That one was also done with scientific reading material, so might have limited applicability.