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Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

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Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#31

Post by beefman »

iskander wrote: post #10

Original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pell...

I could be misglancing this at 1 am, but it looks like a bit of pomp to me. The only data they have are the lengths of the translations (in syllables) and how long it took to read them. The "information density" is just a fancy way to report the former, and they only reveal the latter through the rates. It seems they simply observed that 1. translations differ in length but 2. are read in about the same amount of time. Alas, talk of "information density" had me hopeful they applied a protocol like Shannon's to the spoken domain.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#32

Post by StavrosK »

EREFUNDO wrote: post #23

Actually English has very few syllables compared to Filipino or Spanish. Nearly a third of the words are one syllable and most of the multiple syllable words have either Latin, French, or Greek origin. I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication. Then as our thoughts became more complex they either changed the tone of the syllable (as in Chin…

As an aside, Greek is way more verbose than English, (hence all the multisyllabic words). It's hard to translate UIs to Greek because nothing fits.

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#33

Post by smugengineer69 »

wisty wrote: post #24

From what I can tell, Chinese will often drop tones, just as English will drop vowels (substituting most vowels for a schwa - a kind of "e" or "uh" sound) if the meaning is not too ambiguous. People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounc…

This is completely wrong...Do not listen to this person. I have studied Chinese my entire life and I can assure you, tones are extremely important. Tones are not "dropped", even in fast speech. The problem is actually that the above poster cannot hear them.

This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors:

1) the general poor quality of western Mandarin education, which allows foreigners to get by without properly learning tones because teachers are too nice to say anything about it,

2) The idea that Mandarin and English are massively and irreconcilably different has led to general ignorance about the language, which in turn leads to amateur-level hacks becoming "experts" by merely knowing more than the absolute minimum about the language, and

3) general politeness shown to foreigners in large Chinese tourist destinations.

Once you get beyond novelty party Chinese, you realize that to be properly understood it is absolutely imperative that your tones are correct. Or, barring that, that you make an effort. And even then it requires greater effort from the hearer to run through the often massive number of possibilities to find the correct utterance.

Please, if you are considering learning Mandarin, don't listen to anyone who tells you that tones do not matter. The above post betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the language is spoken.

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#34

Post by vorg »

EREFUNDO wrote: post #23

Actually English has very few syllables compared to Filipino or Spanish. Nearly a third of the words are one syllable and most of the multiple syllable words have either Latin, French, or Greek origin. I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication. Then as our thoughts became more complex they either changed the tone of the syllable (as in Chin…

> I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication

There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract:

'''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#35

Post by stdbrouw »

smugengineer69 wrote: post #33
wisty wrote: post #24

From what I can tell, Chinese will often drop tones, just as English will drop vowels (substituting most vowels for a schwa - a kind of "e" or "uh" sound) if the meaning is not too ambiguous. People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounc…

This is completely wrong...Do not listen to this person. I have studied Chinese my entire life and I can assure you, tones are extremely important. Tones are not "dropped", even in fast speech. The problem is actually that the above poster cannot hear them. This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors: 1) the general poor quality of weste…

Wisty says not pronouncing tones makes you sound like a 4-year old. That doesn't really seem equivalent to telling people that tones are irrelevant. Chillax! :-)

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#36

Post by gbog »

smugengineer69 wrote: post #33
wisty wrote: post #24

From what I can tell, Chinese will often drop tones, just as English will drop vowels (substituting most vowels for a schwa - a kind of "e" or "uh" sound) if the meaning is not too ambiguous. People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounc…

This is completely wrong...Do not listen to this person. I have studied Chinese my entire life and I can assure you, tones are extremely important. Tones are not "dropped", even in fast speech. The problem is actually that the above poster cannot hear them. This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors: 1) the general poor quality of weste…

"This is completely wrong"

"Do not listen to this person."

Please tone down a bit.

Moreover, I agree with grand-parent: tones should not be held as the most important part when studying Mandarin. It is not.

Tones are completely different from one part of China to the other. In Sichuanhua, a horse is MA4 (down), while it is MA3 (down-up) in Beijinghua and in Putonghua. Quite the opposite. Beside these differences, Sichuanese can be understood in Beijing.

I have been 8 years in China, I work in a Chinese company, I listen, speak, read and write Chinese (not perfectly, but good enough). I never cared that much about tones. I cared about understanding what is said and being understood.

Having enough vocab is the main issue. Knowing the different syntactic sugars used in Mandarin is another. Perfect pronunciation of Putonghua tones is of much lower importance.

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#37

Post by makthrow »

wisty wrote: post #26
cageface wrote: post #18

I've been living in Vietnam and trying to learn the language for a while now and this confirms my impression that Vietnamese is very information dense. Most words are monosyllabic and the same syllable pronounced with different tones has completely different meanings. Also, a lot of things we state explicitly in English are left implicit in Vietnamese. You'd expect that a language with greater information density wou…

If Vietnamese is much like Chinese, I wouldn't be surprised. Chinese speakers don't specify much. They tend to hollar low-context imperatives at each other, and hope that everyone already knows their job. Linguists call this a "high context" language, because if you don't have a good idea of the existing context you won't figure much out. I suspect it's related to the extremely strict and ridged hierarchies in China,…

What word is this? Learning Chinese now, curious. Thanks.

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#38

Post by makthrow »

minikomi wrote: post #16
jinushaun wrote: post #4

This article pretty much confirms a suspicion of mine that I've had for a while: strongly syllabic languages like Spanish, Japanese and Tagalog, with their paltry use of consonant clusters, speak/sound faster because (1) scarcity of consonant clusters without tones means that words require more syllables to be uniquely identifiable, and (2) sounds flow more easily when there is a vowel between every consonant. Unlike…

Slightly related - twitter is much more verbose in Japanese purely due to the fact that 140 chars can pack in a lot more information than in English

Same with Korean and Chinese.

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#39

Post by lysium »

sophacles wrote: post #14
lysium wrote: post #11

Hm, .91 'information per syllable' for English at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second are 5.6 'information' per second vs. .49 * 7.84 = 3.8 for Spanish. How is 5.6 "more or less identical amount of information" as 3.8? That's a 47% difference!

Just from the information available in the time article, and from a tiny bit of thinking, I presume there are 2 things going on here: First the article claims that 1 is set arbitrarily to Vietnamese for the value of information density. There are many common ways to normalize measurements, it is obviously not 1/SPSvietnamese for this case. There are most likely other considered factors in the information density calc…

> if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first

Didn't I just do that? You seem to assume I am incredulous about the paper whereas I commented on the article.

Re: Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

#40

Post by Raphael »

void-star wrote: post #9
swah wrote: post #6

I was thinking of Java & Lua.

Seriously, though. Has anybody done a similar information density study on programming languages?

It's pretty easy. Just count the characters, or lines. You can play a game to make the shortest code, golf.
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