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Author Topic: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?  (Read 5050 times)

Darvi

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #30 on: November 23, 2013, 05:26:10 pm »

English has developed as it has, but you're hard pressed to find a language that can boast a triple and oftentimes quadruple vocabulary.
Yup.

But mostly because I don't know what that even means :V
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da_nang

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #31 on: November 23, 2013, 05:41:02 pm »

English has developed as it has, but you're hard pressed to find a language that can boast a triple and oftentimes quadruple vocabulary.
Oh it's not the vocabulary I'm talking about, it's the grammatical structure of the words. The many ways you can morph words into many different meanings by say merely adding a suffix. For instance, Finnish nouns have fifteen cases, all with multiple uses. Words can practically end up anywhere in a sentence because the endings determine the meanings. This has the potential that you need to at least have read the whole sentence once before you can even begin parsing it. Unless you can make it sound very natural, it is likely that subclause/subsentence parsing is limited which increases parsing time. You basically need to remember a whole sentence before you can begin to properly parse it. Speech be damned.

You rarely encounter this e.g. in English as its structure appears more streamlined for on-the-fly parsing.
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FearfulJesuit

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #32 on: November 23, 2013, 07:41:04 pm »

Different languages don't actually have different rates of information density.
Poor choice of words perhaps, but some sentences simply take slightly longer to parse in different languages.

That's not true, either, not in any meaningful way. Native speakers do not have any more trouble parsing language A than they do language B. It does not take them any more time.
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@Footjob, you can microwave most grains I've tried pretty easily through the microwave, even if they aren't packaged for it.

Funk

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #33 on: November 23, 2013, 11:13:43 pm »

English has what i think is the most Versatile Word.

Spoiler: contains swearing (click to show/hide)
in the above sentace we have it is used as an interjection,intransitive,descriptor,transitive...

now our spelling that is a maze of silent letters and rules that are full of holes.
i mean we don't even bother to anglicise the loan words (Czech rather than Check or fjord in stead of fiord)
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Agree, plus that's about the LAST thing *I* want to see from this kind of game - author spending valuable development time on useless graphics.

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Putnam

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #34 on: November 23, 2013, 11:28:20 pm »

Well, we do anglicize literally every demonym that has ever existed.

Skyrunner

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #35 on: November 24, 2013, 12:28:10 am »

English has what i think is the most Versatile Word.

Spoiler: contains swearing (click to show/hide)
in the above sentace we have it is used as an interjection,intransitive,descriptor,transitive...

now our spelling that is a maze of silent letters and rules that are full of holes.
i mean we don't even bother to anglicise the loan words (Czech rather than Check or fjord in stead of fiord)
Actually, Korean has multiple words that work just like fuck does. I often say Korean is the best language to create inventive phrases of swearing in :P
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GlyphGryph

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #36 on: November 24, 2013, 01:17:28 am »

Different languages don't actually have different rates of information density.
Poor choice of words perhaps, but some sentences simply take slightly longer to parse in different languages.
That's not true, either, not in any meaningful way. Native speakers do not have any more trouble parsing language A than they do language B. It does not take them any more time.

Err... this is strictly untrue. There are most definitely languages that have more information density by a great many metrics (at least on average), and are certainly pros and cons of different aspects of different languages in regards to both "easy to learn" and "easy to parse" and "information dense" and "unambiguous to interpret". A lot of language drift is caused by a desire among a subpopulation to change one or more of these aspects.

Now, for a native speaker, this will be almost unnoticeable because human language processing can get, like, super optimized, but there are definitely languages where you can communicate the same thing a lot more quickly or a lot more precisely than in others (on average, between speakers of equal skill).

I think it's also important to make it really damn clear that the written and spoken (and other) "versions" of a language are in many ways different languages entirely for every consideration of the points above. :P
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FearfulJesuit

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #37 on: November 24, 2013, 05:05:19 am »

Different languages don't actually have different rates of information density.
Poor choice of words perhaps, but some sentences simply take slightly longer to parse in different languages.
That's not true, either, not in any meaningful way. Native speakers do not have any more trouble parsing language A than they do language B. It does not take them any more time.

Err... this is strictly untrue. There are most definitely languages that have more information density by a great many metrics (at least on average), and are certainly pros and cons of different aspects of different languages in regards to both "easy to learn" and "easy to parse" and "information dense" and "unambiguous to interpret". A lot of language drift is caused by a desire among a subpopulation to change one or more of these aspects.

Now, for a native speaker, this will be almost unnoticeable because human language processing can get, like, super optimized, but there are definitely languages where you can communicate the same thing a lot more quickly or a lot more precisely than in others (on average, between speakers of equal skill).

I think it's also important to make it really damn clear that the written and spoken (and other) "versions" of a language are in many ways different languages entirely for every consideration of the points above. :P

Yes, and when we talk about aspects of a language that are not strictly written, we mean the spoken language. It's a well-known law of linguistics that human languages all have about the same rate of information density (For the record, this means information per unit of time, not per unit of sound- languages with fewer phonemes tend to be spoken more quickly, but the rate of information transfer is the same). Furthermore, language "drift" has very little to do with information density- I advise that you skim William Labov's Principles of Linguistic Change. Sound and morphosyntactic change is unconscious, and has much more to do with sociolinguistics than it does with information density. (It is true, of course, that sound change can obscure previous distinctions. In this case, speakers simply innovate new forms and structures to compensate; see Southern American English's innovation of "stick pin" and "writing pin" to cover for the pin-pen merger. But the innovation of such structures indicates that human languages do not significantly differ in information transfer rate- if they were, this wouldn't happen so consistently.) It's worth noting that attempts to increase information density by engineering "more efficient" languages have met with failure because the human brain can't handle them (see Ikthuil).

I think part of the problem here is that English speakers, who use a relatively analytic language natively, have a hard time internalizing large inflection patterns; and based on our understanding of "word", that means we conclude that more inflected languages have a higher rate of information density. But that's simply not true; hylly-i-llä and on the shelves (save for the article, which isn't relevant- it's governed by pragmatics and syntax more than semantics; and in any case, English has no analogue of the vowel harmony at work in the Finnish example) have the same number of morphemes, and they don't cause their native speakers any more trouble than the other. It's not that you're wrong- really you're not even wrong. What's your definition of "metric," for example?
« Last Edit: November 24, 2013, 05:13:05 am by FearfulJesuit »
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@Footjob, you can microwave most grains I've tried pretty easily through the microwave, even if they aren't packaged for it.

Darvi

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #38 on: November 24, 2013, 05:40:09 am »

I'unno, "Schadenfreude" is much more dense than "that joy you feel from others' misfortune", just to give an example. There might be other parts where the English term is more dense than the German one, so that the density is roughly equal, but it's not guaranteed.
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cerapa

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #39 on: November 24, 2013, 06:47:03 am »

I'unno, "Schadenfreude" is much more dense than "that joy you feel from others' misfortune", just to give an example.
That's not a very good example. It's simply a case of English missing a word and having to use the full definition.
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Darvi

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #40 on: November 24, 2013, 06:58:22 am »

Mhh, point.
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Tack

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #41 on: November 24, 2013, 07:41:56 am »

Plus more and more English speakers use Shadenfreude or Shadenbidoun(bedon?) now.

Sooner or later it'll warp into a more pronounceable English word and so the language shall grow.
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Dutchling

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #42 on: November 24, 2013, 07:51:05 am »

I thought schadenfreude was an English word already, like kindergarten?
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Owlbread

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #43 on: November 24, 2013, 08:49:28 am »

Galore is a loneword that seems to have no equivalent besides "aplenty", but even then it's not quite right.
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mainiac

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Re: Spending Bitcoin and speaking Esperanto?
« Reply #44 on: November 24, 2013, 08:59:43 am »


I suppose you could say that english is very easy to speak, very hard to speak perfectly.  Pigeon english is very, very easy for a english speaker to understand but is conspicuously not correct.
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