I only wrote it to the wind

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[oracne]

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.

We should totally make this the new conversation-starter.

There are enough Klingon speakers that I'm sure it's adapted somewhat by now.

[a_reasonable_man]

By contrast, there's always Entish. As Tolkien has Treebeard comment, "It takes a long time to say anything in Entish." To my knowledge, no has tried to work it out as a full conlang, which would be interesting--a self-consciously inefficient language.

Speaking of conlanging, I saw some of this film once; it was pretty interesting. I can't recall--have you see it?

[isis]

Interesting thoughts! I never thought of Hebrew as being a conlang but you are right, it really is.

[mrissa]

Every once in awhile someone will say wistfully that when you are grown no one wants to talk about your favorite dinosaurs any more, and I cannot relate to these people, because it comes up a lot in my life.

Of course then it goes into whether mine count because I like the aquatic prehistoric reptiles best and Are Those Really Dinos Y/N but still, it comes up a lot.

[asakiyume]

Efficiency is such a killing concept in my mind, at least most of the time, that I find the thought of using it as a method of exploring language unsettling. Plus, these days I just can't get free of how the very rubrics we use for studying things are so tied in to our mindsets and preconceptions... but I recognize that we can't therefore just stop studying things (and I wouldn't want to), so I don't know where I end up.

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.