11–20 of 46 posts
I remember seeing some mention that English has by far more words than most languages. Saying "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" in other languages is allegedly hard.
maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken. From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.
"The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus (Campione & Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20 texts composed in British English, freely translated into the following languages to convey a comparable semantic content: French (FR), German (GE), Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each text consists of five semantically connected sentences that compose either a narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)."
Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content), translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the information (read) by various native speakers.
The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -> the language tends to be spoker more slowly).
This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies.
To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find japanese right up there.
That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends up sounding unsubstanciated.
In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there."
There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables].
I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this.
[1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...
Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred. Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across. Now, drawing any comp…
I think it's more natural to measure the spoken expression rather than the written expression, specially for Japanese as all the major writing forms[1] were borrowings made to fit the spoken language.
[1] I guess that's pretty generic as all writing forms are made to fit. What I mean is that Kanji characters were fitted upon Japanese language --which had not written form. Basically, the way I understand it, they took a word like Mountain (Yama) and then would ask, how do you write mountain in Chinese（山）/shan/ and then would say (山) = /yama/. Now let's say there was another word that had the sound /yama/ but had nothing to do with mountain, they would still use (山) to write it. so rather than being an ideograph, they became phonographs.
maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken. From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.
maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken. From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.
Inferring from context.. like many programming languages. Is there a programming language you would say most resembles Japanese in spirit?
Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred. Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across. Now, drawing any comp…
Of course, as many people here are saying, the analysis is based on written text and reading out loud, not spoken conversations, which would probably require a different analysis.
Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred. Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across. Now, drawing any comp…
For example, would not "strengths" be considered one syllable?
I don't know about Japanese, but Mandarin has a linguistic syllabic structure that would not allow for such long syllables.