
The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language - TriinT
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24521/
======
crux
This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own
language, rather than simply signed English. Syntax and word order are
entirely different, and much information is encoded in what one might call
'tone'—eg, the energy or rhythm with which any sign is performed—that in
English would be communicated with full words or suffixes.

These facts are patent to anybody with a passing acquaintance of American (or
any other sign language). The 'paradox' they're discussing here is tantamount
to saying, 'Japanese words tend to be longer than English words. So how do the
Japanese communicate as effectively as we do?'

~~~
lionhearted
Good comment. That said...

> 'Japanese words tend to be longer than English words. So how do the Japanese
> communicate as effectively as we do?'

I speak some Japanese. Japanese is actually a bit harder to communicate in
than most other languages. The emphasis on social unity and modesty has
evolved to make the language incredibly nuanced and complex. Nowadays, there's
some factual statements that are almost literally impossible to say in
Japanese because the words/phrases/grammar to say them don't match up.

Feynman touched on this in "Surely You're Joking" - there's different verbs
for the exact same action based on the social situation and how well respected
the person you're talking to is. So if you want someone to look at your
garden, you say something like, "Would you please take-a-pasing-glance at my
barely suitable garden?" But if you want to look at someone else's garden, you
might say, "May I look-with-admiration upon you're beautiful garden?" If it's
an official figure or a temple, it'd be something like, "May I quickly-glance-
my-eyes-over-reverently on your most majestic of gardens?"

Different verbs. All mean "view" - but with different levels of politeness and
appropriateness. One of the HNers who lives in Japan could probably comment
more, I haven't spent all that much time there. Fascinating and beautiful
language, but tricky to say things sometimes.

~~~
yangman
> Nowadays, there's some factual statements that are almost literally
> impossible to say in Japanese because the words/phrases/grammar to say them
> don't match up.

Care to elaborate? As a English/Mandarin/Japanese speaker, I am certainly
acutely aware of the limitations of translating from one language in to
another, but find such an assertion hard to accept without concrete examples.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I'm not sufficiently familiar with Japanese, but I can relate two specific
stories from my own experience.

While travelling and working in Sweden I picked up enough of the language
(alas, now gone) to converse reasonably well over dinner with people I hadn't
met before. They were fluent in English, my colleague was fluent in Swedish.

I asked about the word "varsågod." It seemed to have many translations, often
different for different contexts, and I was wondering how they all perceived
it. The consensus came only after about an hour of back and forth. There is no
translation, even when the context is known.

The best I've come up with is "All is well," but that really, really doesn't
cover it. Sometimes it means "You're welcome," sometimes it means "Here you
are," and there are other contexts.

And the English translations don't carry the extra meanings, the baggage. It
just feels untranslatable. No translation I've seen or heard carries all of
the meanings and nuances.

Another example is from French. The phrase "Je vous en prie" is often
translated as "You're welcome," but it's also very, very formal. You'd hear it
from staff in hotels, perhaps, and perhaps in the very best restaurants.

But the point is that while it effectively means "You're welcome" it actually
carries more information. It also says: and our relationship is a formal one,
such as staff to employer, and I'm in the subordinate position.

There is no way to say that in English without spelling it out explicitly, and
once you've done so you've lost the sense of the original anyway.

It's like explaining a joke. Once you've done so you've given the
understanding needed, but lost the humor.

Similarly with so many things in translation. To carry all the meaning
properly sometimes you have to explain or describe the meaning, and then it's
no longer actually a translation.

The thing I find most interesting is just how many monoglots claim that this
can't possibly be true and give many excellent reasons, while so many
polyglots simply accept it as fact. My wife is fluent in French and works
copy-editing translations from German (and other languages) into English. I've
seen this problem "in action" as it were, and it's why good translators cost
so much, while mediocre translators don't.

EDIT: corrected the Swedish word - thanks. My spoken and reading Swedish was
always better than my written.

~~~
thirdusername
I think you meant to type the composite word "varsågod" (and not "Be so god"
^^), it's not a phrase. A similar problem exist with "lagom" which roughly
means something like: "enough, not to much or to little.", with a strong
positive meaning. It also goes the other way too as computer engineer doesn't
have a good exact translation as the English "engineer" is more nuanced than
the Swedish "Ingengör".

If you feel like procrastinating and want to have a laugh at how ambiguous and
strange Swedish can be I recommend Mastering Swedish by slay radio:
<http://www.slayradio.org/mastering_swedish.php>

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Thanks - corrected. My written Swedish was always lousy.

------
joe_the_user
One obvious point that somehow isn't mentioned in the article:

The speed of human language isn't limited by the ability of "the language" to
encode a stream of information. It is limited by the human ability to create
and understand the bits of language information.

And that limit is _much_ lower than the human ability to take in other streams
of information. Vision lets you take in mega-bytes of information in seconds.
Speech processing involves far less because language processing is such a hard
problem for the brain.

Luria's the "The Working Brain" mentions that _most_ brain damage degrades
speech in some fashion and that's because such a large portion of your brain
works on the speech recognition problem when you are speaking or listening.

And processing language is a hard problem for people (and computers!) because
a language statement involves answering (at least implicitly) global questions
about your store of information - "are all men are mortal", "do black swans
exist" etc.

~~~
Hexstream
"Vision lets you take in mega-bytes of information in seconds. Speech
processing involves far less because language processing is such a hard
problem for the brain."

I've read that people with extraordinary memory or mental arithmetic ability
often visualize shapes and perform operations on them to get at the answer.
And I guess "normal" people use "subvocalization" instead. In light of your
comment, that makes sense.

------
cbr
Calling asl "signed english" is usually a good indication that the writer
doesn't know much about the subject. Then they go on to say:

> "It turns out that the information content of handshapes is on average just
> 0.5 bits per handshape less than the theoretical maximum. By contrast, the
> information content per phoneme in spoken English is some 3 bits lower than
> the maximum."

Talking about the information content of speech symbols is likely to be
entirely bunk, but I'm going to go read the full article and try to find out
whether the summary is bad or if the research is really this confused.

~~~
cbr
Just read the full article. It's no good. Analyzing ASL in terms of hand
shapes only, on the grounds that they're the only feature that all linguists
looking at ASL seem to agree on is really problematic. Computation of entropy
is heavily dependent on the alphabet. If you say english has an alphabet at
the syllable level, you'll get a very different amount of entropy than if you
say the alphabet is phoneme level. If you go a level below phonemes and look
at distinctive features (voiced/unvoiced, aspriated/unaspriated, front/back,
high/low, ...) you'll get yet another entropy number altogether. These numbers
will be wildly different from each other. Entropy calculations between
languages must use comparably derived alphabets which cover the whole
communication channel, or they will be meaningless. Argh. Junky article.

------
jackfoxy
I too find information theory a fascinating subject. Several commentors are
disappointed by the trivial nature of the study (which I assume none of us
have read). That is a problem with trying to apply theory to real world
problems, You often have to make compromises in the quality of your
interpretation of the problem in order to rigorously apply the tools of
theory. I'm guessing the researches picked up some understanding of ASL during
their research (if they didn't have some to begin with), but chose to frame
their study so the parameters were easier to quantify.

------
sethg
There's a very nice sign in ASL to describe this article. It uses two hands,
and one of them is a fist with the index and little fingers extended, like the
horns of a bull.

(1) I'm pretty sure it was Klima and Bellungi's book _The Signs of Language_
that pointed out that arm muscles are slower than vocal muscles, and therefore
ASL does things that spoken languages _can't_ do in order to maintain the same
communication bandwidth. (That book was written _ten years ago_.)

(2) The handshape is only a very small part of what conveys meaning in sign
language; _one of the classic newbie mistakes in learning ASL_ is to look at
your conversation partner's hands, rather than his or her eyes. A great deal
of _grammatical_ information is communicated purely by facial expression; for
example, raised eyebrows can indicate a yes/no question, lowered eyebrows can
indicate a wh-question, and just looking in one direction or shifting the body
slightly can substitute for a pronoun. There are also movements of the mouth
that act as adverbial modifiers for a sign, to indicate things like "almost",
"carelessly", "with difficulty", "distant in time or space", and a whole bunch
of other stuff.

(3) With regard to the hand and arm movements themselves, the location and
movement of the signs are as significant as the handshape. The signs for
"father" and "mother" differ only in location. The signs for "paper" and
"cheese" differ only in movement. Skimming the article, it appears that the
authors didn't bother taking location and movement because linguists disagree
on how to categorize those other features. But that's no excuse for
_completely leaving them out_ of your analysis. That's methodological
laziness.

(4) Modulation of movement also has grammatical significance which in English
would be conveyed by modal verbs or adverbs. For example, a change in how you
make the sign for "to be red" turns it into "to become red". The Klima and
Bellungi book above has more of this kind of thing.

(5) There's also the ASL classifier system, which provides a concise way of
using the relative position and motion of hands to indicate the relative
position and motion of objects in physical _or metaphorical_ space. I once saw
a lecture at which a woman very eloquently used this to describe herself
advancing through all four years of her college education while a friend of
hers kept repeating her "prep" year. (Gallaudet has a pre-freshman year for
students who, thanks to the ocean of suck that is the American deaf-ed system,
don't arrive with adequate college preparation.)

There have been _over thirty years_ of serious linguistic research into ASL,
and judging from the references, these jokers didn't do more than strip-mine
it for a list of handshapes. AAARRRGGGHH!

------
sev
Along similar lines as the article, I've always thought about how we can be
more efficient when speaking. If you notice, there is a tendency to be more
and more efficient on the web, with abbreviations/acronyms. Imagine a world
where we say "lol" just as though we type it (not hard to imagine). Now take
it a few steps further, by considering the vast amount of different
sounds/tones our vocal chords can create, imagine if we keep simplifying the
spoken language to a point where it becomes like one of those star-trek
civilizations with their clicking sounds when they speak.

I believe the trend is inevitible.

~~~
mhb
Based on how I, like, hear many people, like, talking, I'm, like, not so sure
it's, like, inevitable.

~~~
sev
Like, such as, like, Miss Teen USA South Carolina, such as.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww>

------
mhb
What did they study? The accompanying photograph shows the alphabet, but I
assume they aren't just considering using sign language to spell out words.
Then they mention phonemes, but those letters aren't phonemes. Are there signs
for phonemes? And ASL has signs for words.

