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Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

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Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#21

Post by patio11 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #12

When I learned Japanese I found I could spit out a lot of words without actually saying anything of substance. "sou sou! sou desu ka... eeto des ne... "

Really? Is that so? Umm, erm, well, how do I put it, English... ya know what I mean.

We had an exercise once in Japanese class for who could go longest on hesitation noises without including substantial content. I remember losing at only 46 seconds. This is not a Japanese exercise, this is a fluency exercise. All languages have a right way to say nothing because nothing is often the right thing to say.

P.S. There are very fluent and fluid ways to say absolutely nothing of substance in both English and Japanese. Try playing the improv game "Talk like a politician": given an accusation of a true statement ("You had a banana for lunch"), dispute the charge without actually saying that you did not have a banana for lunch. You can use arbitrarily sophisticated English (or Japanese) for this.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#22

Post by corysama »

Locke1689 wrote: post #18
rollypolly wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inferring from context.. like many programming languages. Is there a programming language you would say most resembles Japanese in spirit?

Where did you get this idea? Programming languages infer almost nothing from context. Moreover, when they do that's often seen as bad because it usually creates ambiguous semantic or syntactic constructs. Good programming languages are often based off of a formal language[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language

Basic Japanese always struck me as having special purpose registers and a postfix notation. The basic sentence structure is "noun wa noun da verb." where wa is the "set the subject" operator and da is "set the direct object" operator then stating a verb sets the verb register to complete the statement.

Once a register is set, you are able to omit it from later sentences until you want to change its value. "noun wa noun da verb. noun da verb." would indicate that the same subject is doing two different things to two different objects.

More operators: http://fm1397.com/knowledge/chalkboard/chalkboard-session-5-...

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#23

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

mc32 wrote: post #16
muyuu wrote: post #10

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…

Syllables are about spoken language (speech). Kanji Hiragana and Katakana and Romaji are about writing. 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 f…

IIRC they are still ideographs, usually representing the japanised chinese pronunciation of a word and the japanese pronunciation of a word.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#24

Post by silentbicycle »

iron_ball wrote: post #11
rubashov wrote: post #7

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.

Those three words are composed of Greco-Roman bases. Is English unique in having so many words like that? (And does anyone know the linguistic term for words made by "mixing and matching" existing roots and affixes?)

Agglutination.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#25

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

shadowmint wrote: post #14

It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable: "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 Chines…

>comparable semantic content

Hmm. Would this mean specifying similar amounts of context? Japanese from the little I know, at least when spoken, omits a lot of details that can be inferred from the context. I would imagine casual speech to be far more efficient than polite formal writing, which includes many details that would otherwise be left out and uses the longer "polite" verb forms.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#27

Post by sassafras »

muyuu wrote: post #10

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…

Strictly speaking, Japanese is moraic, in that it divides the rhythm of speech into units potentially smaller than a "conventional" syllable. For instance, the transliteration of "ice", as in "ice cream", would be three mora: "a" "i" "su". To me this is somewhat problematic, as the methodology of the study had native (or proficient) speakers counting the syllables as the corpus was transcribed, and it's unclear to me whether a native speaker would even count syllables in the same way an English speaker would. Another potential flaw is that the syllables counted were for "careful" speech, which differs phonetically from casual speech even in formal registers. For instance, the word "kakushita" (hidden) is technically 4 mora long, but in normal speech the u and i are effectively swallowed, even though a speaker would pronounce them if carefully sounding out the word. In this sense, either syllable or mora count is not necessarily a great metric, as you'd probably be better off counting the number of uttered phonemes in recorded speech.

However, the study is still quite interesting. Besides the syllabic analysis and derived information density, they also analyzed recorded speech for the time necessary to convey equivalent semantic content, and while this metric diverges somewhat from the others, Japanese still comes out at the bottom of the group. It's worth pointing out that if this hypothesis is correct, it's not at all in conflict with anecdotal observations about the high context in Japanese conversation. If anything, one would expect context to take over when formal information density is low, much the same way that tonal languages often have comparatively low phonemic inventories.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#28

Post by chao- »

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus:

Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice.

Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on, but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash of ambiguity can provide some added politeness.

Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness. Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and such doesn't feel so slow when spoken.

Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't the whole picture.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#29

Post by batista »

ineedtosleep wrote: post #15

I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language. 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…

>In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University

Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#30

Post by evincarofautumn »

chao- wrote: post #28

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus: Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic id…

Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.
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