Re:A simple explanation of Chinese characters
by jensen123 on Wednesday December 16, 2015 @03:15AM
(#10742992)
On the other hand, I would think that a language that uses tones has higher "bandwidth". When you use tones, you can use shorter words. With these shorter tone-words, you can "transfer" more information in less time, compared to a non-tonal language.
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Re:A simple explanation of Chinese characters
by cageface on Wednesday December 16, 2015 @04:30AM
(#10743220)
This is true. Vietnamese is tonal and mostly monosyllabic, for example. But it turns out that people tend to speak very information dense languages like this more slowly, so the overall information density is similar among languages. Maybe humans can only process information so fast?
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...