

Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others - metellus
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html

======
cageface
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 would lead to
higher rates of transmission error but people here don't seem to have any more
trouble understanding each other on the phone or in noisy environments than we
do in English.

~~~
wisty
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, and the _extremely_ flexible and implicit social networks. Your boss
doesn't ask you to do a favor. They order you. In contrast, you don't ask your
neighbour if you can borrow a cup or sugar, you just take it, and pay back the
favor some other time. If they don't let you (and don't have a good reason),
you just never talk to them again (or if that's too severe, silently downgrade
your relationship with them).

Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese. i.e. "My mother made
me do my homework, then she made me watch TV".

~~~
CWuestefeld
_Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese._

In Mandarin, the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same phoneme with
different intonation. To my untrained ear, they both sound like "my" -- but
they mean opposites.

~~~
mc32
Chinese and English are remarkable in how they address ideas. In Chinese, for
the most part, there are only basic words -with little available in the way of
synonyms for supplying nuance.'

So you ask someone how do you say big. How do you say gigantic, how do you say
long, how do you say capacious, etc. It's all "da" ”大“。

So when people come to me in English and say something like you know,
capricious is not exactly the same as whimsical, I can say, that's only
because you think it can't be. But it can be. It only is because we've
integrated words from French, Latin, Scandinavian, etc. which give us the
breadth of choice. But it's kind of artificial anyway and if you force
yourself to think about basic meanings -there is little difference. (Law
excluded).

------
jinushaun
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 a language like German,
you're not always stopping your speech to enunciate adjacent consonants.
Therefore, longer words + easier to pronounce = fast speech.

~~~
minikomi
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

~~~
asymmetric
didn't the study state just the contrary: that english is more dense than
japanese?

~~~
e2daipi
This study was about syllables, not characters vs symbols.

Example:

Japanese for mouth 口 = 1 "character" English = 5 charachters

The syllables are irrelevant, though above they match; twitter care about
characters.

Also note the:

> _"Slightly related"_

------
iskander
Original paper: [http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-
releases/pell...](http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-
releases/pellegrino-et-al.pdf)

~~~
beefman
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>

------
wisty
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 pronounce
tones correctly. IMO, getting the vowels and consonants right is harder (and
more important).

Seriously, here's the pairs you will confuse:

d / t - d is unaspirated

j / zh - j is a "cjsch" sound (a bit like "A _s_ ia") while zh is a "j" sound

q / ch - q is a "bright" (slightly whistled?) ch; ch is a "dark" ch)

x / sh - x is a "bright" sh and sh is a "dark" sh

c / s - c is a "ts", s is just s

b / p - b can sound a little closer to p than in English and p is more
aspirated

g / k - g sounds a little close to k, while k is more aspirated

Then there's the vowels, which are really hard. Learning four tones is
comparatively easy.

If you don't get the consonants almost 100% correct, people will simply not be
able to tell what you are saying. If you don't use tones, they can usually
understand, as long as you use simple words (which face it, you will).

~~~
smugengineer69
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.

~~~
gbog
"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.

~~~
smugengineer69
Yes, there are regional variants of Modern Standard Mandarin, but the ways in
which these deviate from the proscribed standard are predictable and in fact
generally internally consistent. Note, this is a separate matter from the
dialects themselves, which are usually not mutually intelligible with
Mandarin, although they influence the regional character of the Mandarin
itself spoken there.

The thing is, subtitles are everywhere in China (Watch any movie or newscast),
because it is difficult if not impossible to understand dialect speakers, and
beyond that, to understand the non-standard mandarin that has been influenced
by the these dialects.

The problem with the sentiment "I can get by just fine without tones"(obvious
paraphrase) is that "get by just fine" and "without tones" are both statements
that need further qualification.

I maintain my central point: Tones are obviously important in a tonal
language, and the extent you can be understood without using them is
determined almost entirely by the skill of the listener, as well as their
acquaintance with other non-standard speakers and/or foreigners.

The reason for my tone in these posts is that I think this sort of attitude
speaks badly for all foreigners studying Chinese. It betrays a sort of
borderline arrogant exceptionalism that says "I can learn Your language, but
on my terms. And in English, there are no tones". The reality is that Chinese
speakers have come to expect very little from foreigners who are studying
their language...and ironically this just continues the cycle, and these
cocksure foreigners receive affirmation for simple, atonal phrases that native
speakers must work hard to understand.

------
lysium
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!

~~~
sophacles
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 calculation (whose unit we don't
actually know btw... but it is presented as a ratio otherwise they wouldn't
normalize to 1), or they could just be doing some other statistical funging.

Second: With a little bit of thinking you could realize that you aren't
getting a good scientifically sound write-up from the Time article -- mostly
because this is how they present things (consumable for the masses!). The
article writer could be picking completely arbitrary measures as important for
people to puzzle over and say "Wow!" at and ignoring the real results. It has
happened countless times in the past and will continue to do so for the
forseeable future.

Basically what I am saying: if you want to do the incredulous thing, please
put some thought in first.

~~~
lysium
> 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.

~~~
onemoreact
Putting some thought into it. I think you multiply not add information
density, but there are also limits on how complex a message you can decode.
Consider the information density of each sylible is also limited by the
grammer used.

1 cm left 4 cm up

If you drop '4 cm up' you go from a 2D to a 1D but replace up with blue does
not mean anything.

------
djtumolo
Does anyone else get really annoyed with the interjections about other
articles I should read on Time? Reminds me of those Bing commercials.

------
EREFUNDO
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 Chinese) or added prefixes and suffixes to
alter the meaning of the root word. Those language families that decided to
add prefixes and suffixes became known as "inflectional" languages. Those that
remained mono-syllabic have a variety of tones per syllable.

~~~
vorg
> 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.'''

~~~
EREFUNDO
My theory is as long as it contains meaning then that would be considered a
"word", the number of syllables is irrelevant. I could arguably say that a
word is an "irreducible unit of information" in the human language. For
inflectional languages we can reduce the word by taking out prefixes ans
suffixes and the root word will still have meaning. But the meaning changes as
well so in essence it becomes a completely different word albeit somewhat
related.

------
swah
I was thinking of Java & Lua.

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

~~~
_mhp_
Isn't that one of the arguments in favour of Lisp and similar languages? That
the information density is so much more conducive to writing expressive code
that is still sufficiently concise to keep in your head whilst writing it?

------
awongh
The interesting thing this article seems to suggest is that languages and
speaking styles naturally seems to self-correct to provide the same amount of
information, i.e, as density goes down, speed goes up- the ratio is
essentially always the same.

I'd be interested to see a larger sample of languages, that is, is there a
language in which the decrease of either density or speed isn't combined with
an increase of the other. (or the opposite) Or are humans all naturally
predisposed to generate/accept information at a similar rate?

------
saintfiends
I would have thought it is because when familiar patterns of syllables are
heard we tend to concentrate more on context and meaning. While the other
makes you concentrate more on the syllables itself.

~~~
aik
I believe that is in line with their findings. Since Japanese has more
syllables than any other tested language (where nearly every other letter is a
vowel) it would make sense that a faster rate of unknown syllables flying by
would result in the perception of faster speech.

It's interesting that while the Japanese have such a focus on efficiency,
their spoken and written language is potentially more contrary to this value
than any other language out there.

~~~
A1kmm
> Since Japanese has more syllables than any other tested language

The article claims less information is encoded in each syllable, not more (as
would be expected if more syllables were available).

The Japanese syllabaric alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are larger than the
roman alphabet, but the smaller alphabet doesn't mean that Japanese has more
syllables than English. English syllables are written using multiple roman
letters, and there are far more combinations possible than in hiragana or
katakana (hiragana and katakana do allow small letters written between
characters to modify the syllables represented, but even taking this into
account, there are far more syllables possible when writing English).

On top of this, written hiragana or katakana maps unambiguously to the spoken
language, but with English, there is more than one possible pronunciation for
many character sequences, and the speaker often needs to know the word and
sometimes even how it fits into the sentence to know which of several possible
syllables to pronounce.

~~~
narism
So basically, it's bus width vs. clock rate. Although it looks like there is a
natural upper bound on throughput.

One thing the article doesn't mention but the paper goes into is the syllabic
complexity. Vietnamese and Chinese both have a ridiculous amount of tones
(from a Western perspective). From the paper:

    
    
      Language  Syllable Set  Weighted Syllabic Complexity
      English   7,931         2.48
      French    5,646         2.21
      German    4,207         2.68
      Italian   2,719         2.30
      Japanese  416           1.93
      Mandarin  1,191         3.58
      Spanish   1,593         2.4
    

English gets the density from a huge syllable set and an average syllabic
complexity. Mandarin has a fairly small set but high complexity.

From my experience with Japanese, it seems like it has evolved to compensate
for the low density:

A lot of the pronouns (I/he/she) tend to be dropped and assumed from context

Some verb forms take the place of longer phrases: taberu koto ga
dekimasu->taberaremasu

In spoken/casual usage, many phrases are shortened: oiteoite -> oitoite, my
personal favorites are the arigato gozaimasu-> mumble-zaimasu or the
irrashaimase->mumble-mase

~~~
minikomi
Oitoite comes from oite oku I believe. To put, and leave something in place.

~~~
narism
Yeah, maybe not the best example because it's sort of a repetition of oku,
meaning put it there (implied:so I can do something with it in the future). It
just stuck in my head because I had heard it conversationally before I learned
it in class and had a _ding_ lightbulb moment.

Maybe a better example of ~teoite->~toite shortening is aketeoite (proper, 6
syllables), meaning open it (for some future purpose) -> aketoite
(spoken/casual, 5 syllables)?

------
willf
Here's a regression graph of Information Density vs Syllable Speed based on
data from the preprint.
[https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter...](https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FdvfurXu)

------
mootothemax
I'd also like to know about reading speed; I'm _convinced_ that subtitles in
Polish are displayed for mere microseconds, and the same rapid-fire display is
true for various dot-matrix-type signs.

~~~
morganls
Don't know about polish, but lots of studies discuss this with chinese vs.
english. One example:

<http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/>

"The reading rates were about 385 equivalent words per minute for Chinese and
380 words per minute for English for the same scientific textual material
(Table 1)"

Probably worth digging more to see if the consensus has changed since then.
That one was also done with scientific reading material, so might have limited
applicability.

