I only wrote it to the wind
I am fascinated by the recent study on linguistic efficiency which I ran across this afternoon while lying on a couch under a cat. Obviously it is not the last word on the subject—a sample set of seventeen languages from nine language families is barely scraping the surface, especially when it's heavily weighted toward Indo-European—but I am already impatient for further work, because if it turns out to be true that all human languages are about as efficient at transmitting information regardless of their average rate of speech, then I want to know if the same holds true of conlangs. I feel it should be true of the good ones, in that they will behave most like natural languages, but because so many of them exist only on the page or in specifically translated dialogue, it might well not be, simply because they haven't been subject to the pressures of extempore speech. (What I think I actually said to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch was, "Is Quenya efficient, or just pretty?" Meanwhile Klingon was designed to sound weird to humans and I would love to know what that did to its information capacity.) In the case of natural languages that started life as conlangs, like Modern Hebrew, is efficiency one of the properties they acquire as they adapt to daily use and the bells and whistles give way to the lasting word for tomato? I want someone to loop Ghil'ad Zuckermann in on this question. But mostly I want the researchers to get some Afroasiatic or Arawakan or Trans–New Guinea or or or languages into their mix and see what happens then.
I am also just very fond of this illustrative bit in the Atlantic article which I read before the actual paper in Science Advances—
The basic problem of "efficiency," in linguistics, starts with the trade-off between effort and communication. It takes a certain amount of coordination, and burns a certain number of calories, to make noises come out of your mouth in an intelligible way. And those noises can be more or less informative to a listener, based on how predictable they are. If you and I are discussing dinosaurs, you wouldn't be surprised to hear me rattle off the names of my favorite species. But if a stranger walks up to you on the street and announces, "Diplodocus!" it's unexpected. It narrows the scope of possible conversation topics greatly and is therefore highly informative.
—mostly because it sounds as though it is suggesting that if you really want to communicate with someone, you should walk up to them cold and shout dinosaur names at them. I must say from experience, it works great for five-year-olds.
spatch was, "Is Quenya efficient, or just pretty?" Meanwhile Klingon was designed to sound weird to humans and I would love to know what that did to its information capacity.) In the case of natural languages that started life as conlangs, like Modern Hebrew, is efficiency one of the properties they acquire as they adapt to daily use and the bells and whistles give way to the lasting word for tomato? I want someone to loop Ghil'ad Zuckermann in on this question. But mostly I want the researchers to get some Afroasiatic or Arawakan or Trans–New Guinea or or or languages into their mix and see what happens then.I am also just very fond of this illustrative bit in the Atlantic article which I read before the actual paper in Science Advances—
The basic problem of "efficiency," in linguistics, starts with the trade-off between effort and communication. It takes a certain amount of coordination, and burns a certain number of calories, to make noises come out of your mouth in an intelligible way. And those noises can be more or less informative to a listener, based on how predictable they are. If you and I are discussing dinosaurs, you wouldn't be surprised to hear me rattle off the names of my favorite species. But if a stranger walks up to you on the street and announces, "Diplodocus!" it's unexpected. It narrows the scope of possible conversation topics greatly and is therefore highly informative.
—mostly because it sounds as though it is suggesting that if you really want to communicate with someone, you should walk up to them cold and shout dinosaur names at them. I must say from experience, it works great for five-year-olds.
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But I guess I question what it means for a language to be efficient in transmitting information. What counts as transmission? What counts as [correct] reception/understanding? We transmit information with a significant glance, with our posture, with our hesitations, with so much more than the words we speak, so trying to look at what's conveyed by words alone seems already to be an artificial thing.
To back off that gripe for a moment, I remember in a video about the Awkwesasne Freedom School, where the kids learn Kanienkehaka (Mohawk), it said that certain greetings and things took more time in Kanienkehaka than in English, but as I recall, the implication was that more was being transmitted, that the notion of what a greeting should be was just more complex.
I've also heard, just vaguely in the linguasphere, that languages tend toward simplification over time, losing tenses, moods, etc. I don't know if that's actually true or just an inaccurate popular conception.
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Language is about communication in context, not in abstract information units.
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I don't. I really like the idea of languages evolving like living creatures so that despite a wide and fertile variation across and within cultures on everything from phonology and morphology to concepts of animacy or time, through similar pressures of good-enough optimization they still arrive at such an essential shared property as reducing uncertainty (Claude Shannon's definition of information) at about the same rate. I'd like to see it tested with a broader range of languages, a larger sampling of speakers, and a more rigorous methodology, but it's an attractive equality and it makes sense given the common factors of anatomy and neurology. The paper is not arguing that languages should be made more or less efficient according to principles of industrial production or even that some languages are inherently more efficient and should therefore be given preference. The metaphor here is more radio than economics. Human languages are of course not radio signals (even when we're speaking Morse: every operator has their own recognizable fist) and I don't believe the paper is attempting to reduce them to such; it's trying to study one aspect of encoding information in speech and I think it's a really neat start.
I remember in a video about the Awkwesasne Freedom School, where the kids learn Kanienkehaka (Mohawk), it said that certain greetings and things took more time in Kanienkehaka than in English, but as I recall, the implication was that more was being transmitted, that the notion of what a greeting should be was just more complex.
That would match what the study seems to find: that whether it takes a long or a little time to say something in a given language, the density of information remains roughly the same. Which is why I want the next generation of research to include indigenous languages, of which there were conspicuously none in this iteration.
I've also heard, just vaguely in the linguasphere, that languages tend toward simplification over time, losing tenses, moods, etc. I don't know if that's actually true or just an inaccurate popular conception.
I don't know! I certainly know of linguistic features that dropped out of their languages or persisted only in fossilized form; but I also know other languages that retained those same features. So I'm not sure it's a universal. It's the kind of statement that always makes me a little suspicious because it sounds so much like complaining that language is being dumbed down, but that may not be a justified suspicion.
I couldn't answer this comment earlier because I was picking my niece up from school.)
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I didn't feel slighted! It can take me days to answer comments! And I don't think answers are necessary for all comments, but I really appreciate your taking the time to answer this one so fully, because it's an interesting topic and I pretty much figured you **did** have a different feeling about the concept than I did, and I like hearing your thoughts.
Intuitively it seems right to me that all human languages perform their role as communication tools equally well, even if they differ in how they actually do the job. In fact, that seems to be something I'd take as axiomatic. I understand that the paper is trying to show something more particular, though, which *isn't* axiomatic. I can't really understand the paper, though--I did look. Maybe I need a cat on top of me to help stimulate my brain. ... Anyway, though; my bet would be that conlangs would follow similar patterns to naturally arising languages, but maybe not! That would be another avenue these researchers could explore.
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You left a thoughtful comment and I didn't want to leave it hanging in the void!
In fact, that seems to be something I'd take as axiomatic.
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. . . The above remark was left by Autolycus, clearly doing his catly best to help you understand. Failing that, I thought the gloss in the Atlantic was useful.
Intuitively it seems right to me that all human languages perform their role as communication tools equally well, even if they differ in how they actually do the job. In fact, that seems to be something I'd take as axiomatic.
Agreed, but if it hasn't actually been tested, then it's valuable that someone is even trying to find out if it's true. There's a whole swath of science that feels like "well, obviously," but it still matters that it isn't obvious to so many people.
Anyway, though; my bet would be that conlangs would follow similar patterns to naturally arising languages, but maybe not! That would be another avenue these researchers could explore.
There's so much I want to know from this study and I don't know how long I'm going to have to wait for it!