Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
medicalxpress.com
Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#21.5 million what? Fix your title.
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#3[deleted]
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#4How would it be possible that 40,000 words translates to 400,000 bits?! Am I missing something here?
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#51.5 million what? Fix your title.
reminds me of that "hacker steals millions of internet data" joke
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#61.5 million what? Fix your title.
Fixed!
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#7How would it be possible that 40,000 words translates to 400,000 bits?! Am I missing something here?
My only guess is that they are implicitly ignoring information we use all the time when talking about information in a computer. The number 5 stored in one place in a computer is the same as the number 5 stored elsewhere. In the human brain two words are already different because they are in different places. The researchers aren’t counting information needed to tell them apart.
Admittedly, this is not the way I think either.
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#8So, all of it fits on a floppy? Nice.
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#9How would it be possible that 40,000 words translates to 400,000 bits?! Am I missing something here?
Compression I suppose. Like storing the word "compression" is easier if you already know the familiar "com-" prefix as well as the noun "pression". Which is itself easier to remember if you know the verb "to press".
I've been actively learning Portuguese and Russian lately, it's impressive how much faster I can pick up Portuguese vocabulary vs. Russian. And that's even for words that don't have an obvious cognate in languages I already know. The structure of the words, the various building blocks are just so much more familiar in Portuguese. A word like "atrever" (to dare) doesn't have any obvious cognate in languages that I know but it just "looks right" it a way that, say, "atverer" or "aterver" wouldn't. Those last two words sound distinctly un-Portuguese (I might say, un-Romance) to me. That makes it a lot easier to remember the spelling.
Eventually as I grow my Russian vocabulary I start making similar connections. Волноваться is pretty tricky to memorize on its own but it becomes easier when you know that ~ся is the reflective, ~ть is the common verb ending, волна means wave and ~овать is a very common building block for Russian verbs.
Re: Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information
#10Makes me want to write a retrocyberpunk setting featuring languages loaded off floppy disks.