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Tem42 comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong Discussion

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: Tem42 01 December 2015 02:48:08AM 0 points [-]

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.

This doesn't seem likely to generalize reliably to specialist constructed languages. I believe that it is true it when it comes down to average people talking about everyday things, but specialist subjects use specialized jargon and a shared bank of knowledge to communicate very complicated ideas very quickly. As a simple example, words like xor and nand, once they are fully understood and become automatic, do increase the rate of information transmission; likewise introducing the concepts behind 'bacteria', 'molecule', and 'atom' results in much quicker communication about a certain aspect of the world.

If you are constructing a language to hold rational debate, it does make sense to increase information transfer by expecting, and teaching, the language learners to match complex concepts with simple words. This should mean, in practice, more information per phoneme per second in the targeted areas.

While there will be a trade-off between time spent learning the framework and ability to communicate quickly, most rationalists are happy to spend time learning useful frameworks.