Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/japanese-conveys-information-more.html

by fogus • 14 years ago

36 45 14 years ago

dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.co.uk

Symmetry• 14 years ago

maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken.

From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.

rollypolly• 14 years ago

Inferring from context.. like many programming languages.

Is there a programming language you would say most resembles Japanese in spirit?

Danieru• 14 years ago

No, its more like a unified diff.

Locke1689• 14 years ago

Where did you get this idea? Programming languages infer almost nothing from context. Moreover, when they do that's often seen as bad because it usually creates ambiguous semantic or syntactic constructs. Good programming languages are often based off of a formal language[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language

gommm• 14 years ago

Exactly, the less formal the japanese is, the more unspoken words are left to be guessed by the context...

Another interesting thing about japanese is that because of the lower number of different syllables it's easier to understand in situations when it's not possible hear clearly (like on mobile phones when the reception is not good). I've remarked on it when living there and had a researcher working in the field confirm me that it was the case (not to sure of the details but that was during a discussion on voice compression).

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

Maybe this explains why Hatsune Miku can perform live shows for millions around the world while people still have trouble taking Microsoft Sam and Anna seriously.

YmMot• 14 years ago

> the lower number of different syllables

I have a theory that this is why the Japanese are so (seemingly) fond of portmanteaus. It makes it easier to smoosh words together.

mc323• 14 years ago

Sounds a bit like mafiosi conversations where it's mostly context with a few details in order to avoid being overt about what they're discussing. Albeit without the use of codeword substitutes.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

Yeah, since it isn't very reliant on word order for denoting function of words in a sentence and instead using markers, practically anything unnecessary can be omitted.

rubashov• 14 years ago

I remember seeing some mention that English has by far more words than most languages.

Saying "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" in other languages is allegedly hard.

iron_ball• 14 years ago

Those three words are composed of Greco-Roman bases. Is English unique in having so many words like that? (And does anyone know the linguistic term for words made by "mixing and matching" existing roots and affixes?)

silentbicycle• 14 years ago

Agglutination.

KoulMomo• 14 years ago

This explains every Final Fantasy game ever made.

coob• 14 years ago

It's also subject to poor interpretation:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_...

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

I cringed, poor director...

mc323• 14 years ago

I cringed for the actor. It's like he's lost among this sea of conversation and only gets a few crumbs. Like grasping at straws of understanding.

muyuu3• 14 years ago

Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred.

Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across.

Now, drawing any comparisons is extremely hard because context doesn't translate, so by definition you cannot create a benchmark. For instance, they convey far more information about social nuance and politeness, to levels that would need whole paragraphs per sentence to explain.

Also, syllables are a horrible benchmark for Japanese since all their syllables are extremely short and quick to pronounce. Their encoding, so to speak, consists of a smaller unit size and a bigger number of units. They have a compression system for text, which is the mixture of kanji and kana.

This basically goes to show how unique Japanese is in many respects and how differently they communicate.

mc323• 14 years ago

Syllables are about spoken language (speech). Kanji Hiragana and Katakana and Romaji are about writing.

I think it's more natural to measure the spoken expression rather than the written expression, specially for Japanese as all the major writing forms[1] were borrowings made to fit the spoken language.

[1] I guess that's pretty generic as all writing forms are made to fit. What I mean is that Kanji characters were fitted upon Japanese language --which had not written form. Basically, the way I understand it, they took a word like Mountain (Yama) and then would ask, how do you write mountain in Chinese（山）/shan/ and then would say (山) = /yama/. Now let's say there was another word that had the sound /yama/ but had nothing to do with mountain, they would still use (山) to write it. so rather than being an ideograph, they became phonographs.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

IIRC they are still ideographs, usually representing the japanised chinese pronunciation of a word and the japanese pronunciation of a word.

muyuu3• 14 years ago

Your understanding is quite wrong, frankly... I wouldn't even know where to start, but I'll just drop that obviously homophones are not written with the same characters...

Kanji were fitted upon Japanese as much as they were upon Chinese. Kanji is a writing system that doesn't depend on phonetics in any way, the correspondence is one-way only.

babar• 14 years ago

The study multiplies the information density by the rate of speech, and you are correct, the Japanese rate of speech is the highest, but it did not compensate for the low information density. This is likely a result of the small number of syllables present in the language (~400 compared to ~7,900 in english).

Of course, as many people here are saying, the analysis is based on written text and reading out loud, not spoken conversations, which would probably require a different analysis.

jisaacstone• 14 years ago

agreed. to conclude "more slowly" there needs to be more than just syllable counting.

For example, would not "strengths" be considered one syllable?

I don't know about Japanese, but Mandarin has a linguistic syllabic structure that would not allow for such long syllables.

sassafras• 14 years ago

Strictly speaking, Japanese is moraic, in that it divides the rhythm of speech into units potentially smaller than a "conventional" syllable. For instance, the transliteration of "ice", as in "ice cream", would be three mora: "a" "i" "su". To me this is somewhat problematic, as the methodology of the study had native (or proficient) speakers counting the syllables as the corpus was transcribed, and it's unclear to me whether a native speaker would even count syllables in the same way an English speaker would. Another potential flaw is that the syllables counted were for "careful" speech, which differs phonetically from casual speech even in formal registers. For instance, the word "kakushita" (hidden) is technically 4 mora long, but in normal speech the u and i are effectively swallowed, even though a speaker would pronounce them if carefully sounding out the word. In this sense, either syllable or mora count is not necessarily a great metric, as you'd probably be better off counting the number of uttered phonemes in recorded speech.

However, the study is still quite interesting. Besides the syllabic analysis and derived information density, they also analyzed recorded speech for the time necessary to convey equivalent semantic content, and while this metric diverges somewhat from the others, Japanese still comes out at the bottom of the group. It's worth pointing out that if this hypothesis is correct, it's not at all in conflict with anecdotal observations about the high context in Japanese conversation. If anything, one would expect context to take over when formal information density is low, much the same way that tonal languages often have comparatively low phonemic inventories.

muyuu3• 14 years ago

I know, take my name for instance. Muyuu (夢遊) it means sleepwalking. In conventional Japanese it would be considered three syllables mu+yu+u. Yu+u are pronounced as a tone "un-switch" after the "yu" - this is why Japanese pronounce so fast, they also make use of a tonal (bi-tonal, tri-tonal depending on accent) system. If the following u was a different proper-syllable, the tone switch would happen (not necessarily a different word). Words are not separated by spaces, neither in speech nor writing. All this is completely "unofficial" in the sense that's not taught formally, like a lot of other things in Japanese. Kids already have this "embedded" when they first go to school.

I do natural language processing in Japanese and typically texts in Japanese say more in less space than English, by far. Both in spoken form and in written form. They say about as much as in Chinese, when both texts are written by native speakers. Now, you cannot compare texts 1-to-1 because when texts are translated, they are remarkably less information-dense. There is a whole lot lost in translation and "not-assumed" when the original writer didn't have a native Japanese context awareness. Reversely, when the text is translated to Japanese it will often be less information dense but not as much. Partly, because the translator will find a balance between not adding information (a basic translation principle) and not sounding unnatural, as this would also take away the attention from the reader. Both cannot be achieved to a high standard between languages as different as, for example, Japanese and English. In the tests I do, I can distinguish with remarkable accuracy when the text was originally written in Japanese or not, and they are all native texts and translations.

Japanese is not just a language, it's also a whole culture and civilisation to an extent most other languages are not, except maybe Korean (who are some sort of bizarro Japanese to be honest... just don't tell either them or the Japanese). Chinese language is shared by remarkably different cultures and ethnics, they don't have the same level of common context. European languages have nowhere as much context.

In Japanese, you'd have a conversation going like this:

A "So, should I leave the umbrella by the door or can I put it to dry open in the aisle?" B "un" (colloquial Japanese "yes")

And, given features that are totally lost or implicit, they'd now exactly what they mean. They'd answer negative, double-negative, even triple-negative questions with monosyllables and know exactly what they meant without any confusion or hesitation.

For me, the benchmark is seeing how much is lost in translations and subtitles in films. Japanese ones subtitled in English lose a massive amount of detail even in the most common conversations. The converse is nowhere close as remarkable. They simply have a much more complex set of rules for social interaction. A lot of what they say is customary but also untranslatable. A lot of what they don't say goes completely unnoticed by a foreigner, because the omission of these customary expressions also carries a lot of meaning. In short, it's not possible to compare the expressiveness of such a different culture, and the way we are even trying to measure it just shows how much we're "not getting it".

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

When I learned Japanese I found I could spit out a lot of words without actually saying anything of substance. "sou sou! sou desu ka... eeto des ne... "

patio11• 14 years ago

Really? Is that so? Umm, erm, well, how do I put it, English... ya know what I mean.

We had an exercise once in Japanese class for who could go longest on hesitation noises without including substantial content. I remember losing at only 46 seconds. This is not a Japanese exercise, this is a fluency exercise. All languages have a right way to say nothing because nothing is often the right thing to say.

P.S. There are very fluent and fluid ways to say absolutely nothing of substance in both English and Japanese. Try playing the improv game "Talk like a politician": given an accusation of a true statement ("You had a banana for lunch"), dispute the charge without actually saying that you did not have a banana for lunch. You can use arbitrarily sophisticated English (or Japanese) for this.

WildUtah• 14 years ago

"Nothing is often the right thing to do an always a clever thing to say." -Will Durant

shadowmint• 14 years ago

It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable:

"The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus (Campione & Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20 texts composed in British English, freely translated into the following languages to convey a comparable semantic content: French (FR), German (GE), Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each text consists of five semantically connected sentences that compose either a narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)."

Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content), translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the information (read) by various native speakers.

The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -> the language tends to be spoker more slowly).

This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies.

To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find japanese right up there.

That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends up sounding unsubstanciated.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

>comparable semantic content

Hmm. Would this mean specifying similar amounts of context? Japanese from the little I know, at least when spoken, omits a lot of details that can be inferred from the context. I would imagine casual speech to be far more efficient than polite formal writing, which includes many details that would otherwise be left out and uses the longer "polite" verb forms.

ineedtosleep2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language.

In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there."

There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables].

I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this.

[1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...

batista2• 14 years ago

>In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University

Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...

ineedtosleep2• 14 years ago

Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics.

Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."?

If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context -- it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object: I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb).

The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure (again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of work and produce more extraneous words.

asynchrony• 14 years ago

In colloquial Japanese the "-nakerebanaranai" form is usually just abbreviated as "nakya". So a four-syllable equivalent to "I have to eat" would be "tabenakya".

chao-• 14 years ago

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus:

Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice.

Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on, but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash of ambiguity can provide some added politeness.

Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness. Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and such doesn't feel so slow when spoken.

Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't the whole picture.

evincarofautumn4• 14 years ago

Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.

vorg2• 14 years ago

> It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective

I tried saying "比+B+<pause>+A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".

AgathaTheWitch• 14 years ago

It is true that spoken Japanese often leaves much up to context. If you were to translate English sentences into literally equivalent Japanese phrases, you would invariably create phrases with far more syllables. However the language is not used the same way as English. A child will say in English "Mom was angry with me." In Japanese he says "okocchatta." Same information conveyed but requiring context for the Japanese (doesn't explicitly say "mom).

Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information. Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways to say this in Japanese.

A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between 9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite.

In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and word connotations.

Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

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