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Unfortunately, this leads to nonsensical literal translations like "ONE-QUANTITY-ABOVE-LIFE-TOWARDS" for "banana," but it's still a neat/interesting concept.
> words in this language correspond to holistic gestures […] even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary. I don't follow: many ASL signs are completely distinct. There are some incorporations, like classifier CL:3 (vehicle) includes a modified 'V' sign. What exactly is the claim: that a language cannot have a 1:1 mapping of simple representation and meaning i.e. is unambiguous and context-free?
In BSL, for example, [as I learnt it some time ago, at a basic level] the signs for class and group share the hand movement but use respectively the hand-shapes for C and G; they're compound gestures. Or any easier one, vehicles like car, bus, etc. are signed by miming use of a steering wheel and saying/mouthing the word (eg http://www.signbsl.com/sign/truck - see the "SignStation" version of this and http://www.signbsl.com/sign/car); again compound.
ABSL presumably has words for car and truck but they don't share visual elements?
To attempt to answer your question I think the idea is that it's surprising that a language is not compounded from smaller elements, like verbs using "ing" to denote action? Or like how Greek prefixes/suffixes are used in English, xeno- say for foreign (eg in xenophobic: fear/hate for foreigners; and xenolith: a rock type foreign to the surrounding rock) or -lith for rocks (as before and megalith: a big rock). One expects to quickly run out of new sounds (or signs) if you don't compound/combine them atomically.
This phenomenon is treated as an example of phonology in the process of emergence in a very young language. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250231/
Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in…
I've been tackling this from a different PoV (see recent comments) of audio bitrate sensing (20 Hz is the beat/tone boundary, where beats become tones , corresponding to about 0.2 MB/day of data acquisition), or of speaking and reading rates. At 100 words/min spoken speech, humans can transmit about 1.1 MB/day sustained (24 hours without interruption). At 600 words/min reading rate (a very high rate, roughly double t…
We can estimate the size of a symbol though: 13b for primary tones(20khz range at about 3Hz resolution) + 4b for rising/falling/etc tonal patterns + 7b for volume (1dB detection over 120db range) + (42 phonemes in english so round up to 256 for convenience) 8b for phoneme patterns + 2 ears preprocessed for 2d directions is maybe 4b direction and 4b distance gives a total of around 40b per symbol.
So with that wild approximation, it's at 800 bps, or 8.64 MB / 24h
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Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…
To say this is to assume that no information is communicated through facial expressions, body language, tone, rhythm, etc. Furthermore, assuming all relevant information is contained in a person's words alone, it's also impossible to say that a particular bit rate representation of an utterance faithfully reproduces all of that information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"but we can only emit a few bits of information" [per second?] I don't think that's true. Physical motion and even sound making in total involves a human being producing a lot more than a few bits of information per second - there are plenty of recordings of people singing, say, that can't compressed to that bitrate. The only thing that's true is that we can pretty much only emit and absorb language information at a…
The audio channel is not the information channel . There's an interesting video on the fastest meaningful musical tempo or speed, which looks at the interonset interval. It turns out that between 100ms and 50ms seems to be that limit: 10 to 20 beats per second. Or, at the low end, 20 Hz. Which is the point at which a series of beats becomes a tone . If you extend this out to a full day, and consider each beat a bit ,…
Any information that a human processes contains a huge amount of prior knowledge and context. Just compare the size of this comment in text bits vs. the (hypothetical) size of the knowledge you need (and have) in order to understand it.
If anything, saying that we communicate only 0.2MB per day illustrates just how huge this prior knowledge must be.
From an information theory perspective human communications might better be modeled as a compressed data stream with a very very big lookup table.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The audio channel is not the information channel . There's an interesting video on the fastest meaningful musical tempo or speed, which looks at the interonset interval. It turns out that between 100ms and 50ms seems to be that limit: 10 to 20 beats per second. Or, at the low end, 20 Hz. Which is the point at which a series of beats becomes a tone . If you extend this out to a full day, and consider each beat a bit ,…
I'd add that the information channel is not the meaning channel . Any information that a human processes contains a huge amount of prior knowledge and context. Just compare the size of this comment in text bits vs. the (hypothetical) size of the knowledge you need (and have) in order to understand it. If anything, saying that we communicate only 0.2MB per day illustrates just how huge this prior knowledge must be. Fr…
I'm not focusing on the overall channel bandwidth because I think it tells the full story, but it does tell an important story, and in particular, it shows just how constrained that channel really is. If we're sucking (or blowing) through a straw, then there's only so much information as can be mediated.
This becomes particularly significant when you look at the amount of crap that people are flooded with, and realise how much this cuts down on the ability to process significant and meaningful information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been tackling this from a different PoV (see recent comments) of audio bitrate sensing (20 Hz is the beat/tone boundary, where beats become tones , corresponding to about 0.2 MB/day of data acquisition), or of speaking and reading rates. At 100 words/min spoken speech, humans can transmit about 1.1 MB/day sustained (24 hours without interruption). At 600 words/min reading rate (a very high rate, roughly double t…
Each beat is probably better considered a symbol, so by your analysis the human audio channel is around 20 baud not 20 bits/s. The symbol size obviously has a large impact on the information bit rate. We can estimate the size of a symbol though: 13b for primary tones(20khz range at about 3Hz resolution) + 4b for rising/falling/etc tonal patterns + 7b for volume (1dB detection over 120db range) + (42 phonemes in engli…
(My first posts on seeing this concept, elsewhere, had confused bits and bytes, so I ended up with 1.7 MB rather than 0.2 MB.)
But the point remains that that what we're discussing is almost certainly a maximum upper bound on human conscious information processing capacity. And that the values are ... pretty limited, relative to the amounts of information our machines can fling at us.
8.6 MB/day means that on average we're looking at 2/3 of that for waking hours or 5.7 MB. If you spend half your waking hours at work, that's about 2.9 MB of information acquired per day at work, max, over audio track.
And that's the tail-end of a 3.5 billion year R&D effort.