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

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

nautil.us

101 pointsfbrusch57 comments

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.

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

Isn't that what the article's title kind of implying though?

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.

If the output isn't coherent or fails to articulate such that the listener doesn't understand the message, then it's hardly adaptive. And I think either definition above speaks to the incomprehensibility of mumbling. If I tell someone something and they grunt in acknowledgement because they're busy rather than enunciating a clear response, that's easy enough to understand. But when someone mumbles, it usually isn't comprehensible and they are just shifting the cognitive burden of guessing what was meant onto the listener. Most often I've come across this when people are not sure how to pronounce a word properly and mumble in embarrassment instead. I'd much rather someone say 'I'm not sure how to pronounce this...'; trying to figure out what they mean when they mumble is exasperating.

I don't think you appreciate the different arguments being made here, and I'm not sure if you read the article past the title.

>If the output isn't coherent or fails to articulate such that the listener doesn't understand the message, then it's hardly adaptive.

Clipping, assimilation, etc. do not meet your criteria as they do not cause incomprehensibility. They may draw prescriptive criticism, but they do not deprive phrases of all conceivable meaning. Those are the types of phenomena that the article is discussing.

More to the point, when I say "adaptive" I am talking about the evolution of language. The winds of change. It isn't always "good" in an objective sense, but it never leads to a breakdown of meaning.

>incomprehensibility of mumbling.

Think of the definition used by the article as "failure to enunciate" and it should make more sense. Perhaps it wasn't the best word choice, but I'm guessing it's reflective of social use. I don't know what else a layman might call "not enunciating", especially since there are several factors involved such as the examples above.

The rest of your comment, as well as chasing's comment, seem to be hinged on the idea that there's only one definition of mumbling, which I just don't agree with, but I won't continue to argue against it either. If you have a better title for the article, I would direct it to the writer.

  > You’re also more likely to [phonetically] reduce words 
  > if they’re predictable in the context, so that the word 
  > fine would be pronounced less distinctly in a sentence 
  > like “You’re going to be just fine” than “The last word 
  > in this sentence is fine.”

If pronouncing words less distinctly isn't mumbling, what is it?

"Phonetic reductions," according to the article. Although in elementary school we learned to call them "contractions." (Isn't. I'll. 'Cause. Didn't. That'll. Who's.)

It's mumbling if the listener doesn't understand the meaning of the word or words at all. Which might be data compression, but I don't think of mumbles a being any more concise, just less intelligible.

But the article has examples that are clearly different from contractions:

> ...the word fine would be pronounced less distinctly in a sentence like “You’re going to > be just fine” than “The last word in this sentence is fine.”

This is again, just semantics, but I suppose you can say it's something akin to "concatenating" or "slurring," although the latter has its own connotations.

  > Although in elementary school we learned to call them 
  > "contractions.

This is the part of your understanding that is incorrect. You're talking about contractions, which linguists call Synaeresis [1]. The article talks about Vowel (Phonetic) Reductions [2], which are changes in the sounds that the speaker emits, not the complete removal of the sounds.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaeresis [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_reduction

+1 for "indecipherable turd"

That phrase is a gem

So, like acronyms and abbreviations?

You appear to have no disagreement with the author of the post apart from the definition of the word "mumbling"

Pretty much. It's a bad title.

Sometimes people just talk too fast. To you, it's mumbling. To them, they're just conveying a lot of information quickly and you're struggling to keep up. Don't assume malice in their intent.

I won't argue that calling it 'data compression' is nothing more than cute spin, though.

I've been told I mumble some times. I blame it on switching between three spoken languages daily though. Not being able to properly pronounce the words quick enough, I tend taking shortcuts, and then happen to mumble a bit more than most people. Not always, but enough that people I interact with often will notice.

And on the point of switching between languages constantly, I've noticed myself loosing a bit of my pronunciation and vocabulary of my native tongue. I blame it on living and working abroad for 8+ years. Makes sense I guess, but still annoying to myself...

> "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).

> (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.

> "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).

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.

> 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.

I feel like science and mathematics (and even computer science) attempts to counter this.

If we can mechanically generate mathematical proofs, and those proofs can be proven equivalent to one another, then we have essentially simplified the abstraction mechanics of the individual brain and transferred them to a computer.

I view abstraction as a means for expanding all potential permutations of a given model and it's application, and then a reduction to a different set of terms that connects models.

We might be able to prove that we can agree with one another, but we might not be able to prove that we agree with our own selves. We can always make the problem more difficult individually by guessing and creating more questions.

To me the process is two sides of the same coin. One side is creation, the other side is destruction. You can't convey an idea without having an idea, and you can't question that idea without having another idea. Negation is still a logical mechanism. You can question whether there is more to think about than a choice between [(exist) or (does not exist)].

I really prefer to think about possibility and potential. It's an open space to me.

Yes, but that essentially is saying the same thing as "people's assumptions can differ".

This can be an assumption about the meaning of a word or subtleties in the collection of concepts that connect to that word (as often seems to be the case with most computer science and mathematics material on the internet). Engineering interestingly enough does not seem to suffer from this insanity.

This can happen from overgeneralizing and even correct simplification. The pattern still fits, but both people have applied the pattern to different 'other stuff'.

We both have different points, so we both are directing this dialogue towards unrelated directions. I will attempt to connect them. I agree with you. Meaning can be an issue in communication. Form can be an issue in communication as well.

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.

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.

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.

Unstressed vowels in all dialects of English are generally reduced to schwa, not just American English.

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.

Is this really a instance of consonants versus vowels or an instance of a large group versus a small group? The biggest reason it is hard to distinguish your second example, is likely because you are changing a larger percentage of the word than in the first example. If you select a random 5 consonants and change them, I have a feeling you would get similar results to changing vowels.

The very fact that there are so many more consonant phonemes than vowel phonemes in English reflects their importance.

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.

That implies making a cognitive activity out of a non-cognitive activity and thus defeating the point.

You can make a cognitive activity into a non-cognitive activity with enough repetition and habit.

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.

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

[1] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

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

>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?

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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/conscienti...

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

Compressed data stops being human readable.

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

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.

When people mumble, it seems they aren't properly communicating information to themselves. It can make them seem like a social deviant.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com