ChristianKl comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong

7 Post author: KevinGrant 29 November 2015 02:40AM

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Comment author: KevinGrant 29 November 2015 08:00:00AM 6 points [-]

Since other replies are drifting in this direction, I'll reply to my own post with a comment about Heinlein's fictional conlang Speedtalk, to which Ithkuil has been compared. Like a lot of people, it was one of the ideas that got me interested in conlangs. But after a bit of research I concluded that it wasn't a fruitful direction to head in. I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared. It turns out that in languages that are spoken faster, as measured in phonemes per second, the information carrying content, measured in bits per phoneme, is smaller. The result is that you really don't seem to get a lot of bang for your buck by monkeying around with your language design to try to increase the rate of information transmission. The bottleneck at the high end seems to be in the processing capacity of the brain, not the structure of the language.

Comment author: ChristianKl 29 November 2015 03:59:14PM *  1 point [-]

I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared.

I'm interested into that research. Can you link it?

Comment author: redding 29 November 2015 04:46:46PM 4 points [-]

Not sure if this is what KevinGrant was referring to, but this article discusses the same phenomenon

http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs-density/

Comment author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 07:27:49AM 1 point [-]

Sorry, I don't have a link for it. The result is just something that I remember reading about many years ago. I looked at the link that redding posted and while it probably isn't the same paper (I think I read about this before 2011) the result seems to match what I remember. There's a possibility that if the linked paper could be retrieved, then whatever I read may be in the bibliography, although I don't know if I'd recognize it as such.