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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

#31
It is true that spoken Japanese often leaves much up to context. If you were to translate English sentences into literally equivalent Japanese phrases, you would invariably create phrases with far more syllables. However the language is not used the same way as English. A child will say in English "Mom was angry with me." In Japanese he says "okocchatta." Same information conveyed but requiring context for the Japanese (doesn't explicitly say "mom).

Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information. Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways to say this in Japanese.

A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between 9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite.

In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and word connotations.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#32
post #21

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…

"Nothing is often the right thing to do an always a clever thing to say." -Will Durant

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#33
post #29

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...

Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics.

Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."?

If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context -- it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object: I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb).

The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure (again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of work and produce more extraneous words.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#34

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 colloquial Japanese the "-nakerebanaranai" form is usually just abbreviated as "nakya". So a four-syllable equivalent to "I have to eat" would be "tabenakya".

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

It’s not nearly that simple, formal, or programmatic.

First, は wa is a topic marker, not a subject marker; the topic need not be the grammatical subject of a sentence, and indeed is often included for emphasis alone. There is a subject marker が ga, but it’s primarily used to introduce new information (“ペンがある。” pen ga aru “There is a pen.”) without changing the topic. だ da or the formal です desu is known as a copula, standing for an assumed verb. This is often is, but not always (“飲み物は?ソーダです。” nomimono wa? sooda desu “What would you like to drink? I’ll have a soda.”). だ is not a direct object marker—you might be thinking of を wo.

Of course, it’s a perfectly reasonable idea to borrow topic-structured statements for a programming language. Just assume the topic wherever a required term is missing:

    = new Window
    .width = 640
    .height = 480
    w =
    = new Button
    .label = "Hello"
    .align = CENTER
    w.add()
It comes with a host of problems, but it’s reasonable. And you might want to have a look at Forth-family languages if you’re into postfix notation and pointfree/tacit programming.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#36
post #9

It's also subject to poor interpretation: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_...

I cringed, poor director...

I cringed for the actor. It's like he's lost among this sea of conversation and only gets a few crumbs. Like grasping at straws of understanding.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agglutination is a specific kind of word formation where roots are concatenated unmodified; it happens in Turkish, some Inuit languages, and Esperanto. More generally the process of word formation is called morphology.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#38
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…

I know, take my name for instance. Muyuu (夢遊) it means sleepwalking. In conventional Japanese it would be considered three syllables mu+yu+u. Yu+u are pronounced as a tone "un-switch" after the "yu" - this is why Japanese pronounce so fast, they also make use of a tonal (bi-tonal, tri-tonal depending on accent) system. If the following u was a different proper-syllable, the tone switch would happen (not necessarily a different word). Words are not separated by spaces, neither in speech nor writing. All this is completely "unofficial" in the sense that's not taught formally, like a lot of other things in Japanese. Kids already have this "embedded" when they first go to school.

I do natural language processing in Japanese and typically texts in Japanese say more in less space than English, by far. Both in spoken form and in written form. They say about as much as in Chinese, when both texts are written by native speakers. Now, you cannot compare texts 1-to-1 because when texts are translated, they are remarkably less information-dense. There is a whole lot lost in translation and "not-assumed" when the original writer didn't have a native Japanese context awareness. Reversely, when the text is translated to Japanese it will often be less information dense but not as much. Partly, because the translator will find a balance between not adding information (a basic translation principle) and not sounding unnatural, as this would also take away the attention from the reader. Both cannot be achieved to a high standard between languages as different as, for example, Japanese and English. In the tests I do, I can distinguish with remarkable accuracy when the text was originally written in Japanese or not, and they are all native texts and translations.

Japanese is not just a language, it's also a whole culture and civilisation to an extent most other languages are not, except maybe Korean (who are some sort of bizarro Japanese to be honest... just don't tell either them or the Japanese). Chinese language is shared by remarkably different cultures and ethnics, they don't have the same level of common context. European languages have nowhere as much context.

In Japanese, you'd have a conversation going like this:

A "So, should I leave the umbrella by the door or can I put it to dry open in the aisle?" B "un" (colloquial Japanese "yes")

And, given features that are totally lost or implicit, they'd now exactly what they mean. They'd answer negative, double-negative, even triple-negative questions with monosyllables and know exactly what they meant without any confusion or hesitation.

For me, the benchmark is seeing how much is lost in translations and subtitles in films. Japanese ones subtitled in English lose a massive amount of detail even in the most common conversations. The converse is nowhere close as remarkable. They simply have a much more complex set of rules for social interaction. A lot of what they say is customary but also untranslatable. A lot of what they don't say goes completely unnoticed by a foreigner, because the omission of these customary expressions also carries a lot of meaning. In short, it's not possible to compare the expressiveness of such a different culture, and the way we are even trying to measure it just shows how much we're "not getting it".

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#39
post #16
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…

Your understanding is quite wrong, frankly... I wouldn't even know where to start, but I'll just drop that obviously homophones are not written with the same characters...

Kanji were fitted upon Japanese as much as they were upon Chinese. Kanji is a writing system that doesn't depend on phonetics in any way, the correspondence is one-way only.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#40
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the less formal the japanese is, the more unspoken words are left to be guessed by the context... Another interesting thing about japanese is that because of the lower number of different syllables it's easier to understand in situations when it's not possible hear clearly (like on mobile phones when the reception is not good). I've remarked on it when living there and had a researcher working in the field c…

Maybe this explains why Hatsune Miku can perform live shows for millions around the world while people still have trouble taking Microsoft Sam and Anna seriously.

I suspect that's more about Japanese celebrity dynamics; consider Naomi Campbell's famous statement on her album sales.
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