Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

Re:Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 b... by vanderZwan on Thursday September 05, 2019 @06:18AM (#20885328)

I kind of want to hear a "blind Danish" conversation now. For those unaware: Danish is phonetically one of the most difficult languages in the world, to the point where children who acquire Danish as their first language on average start speaking a few months later than children with any other first language. To clarify: speaking is not the same as understanding - toddlers are often capable of understanding language before they have the motor control required to speak it, which is why baby sign language exists.

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Re:Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 b... by tralarpa on Thursday September 05, 2019 @07:40AM (#20885687)

Actually, understanding seems to be affected, too! See:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-lan...

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Re:Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 b... by vanderZwan on Thursday September 05, 2019 @10:09AM (#20886791)

Oh wow, did not know that! Then perhaps a better way to phrase it is that it does not imply slower general mental development of the children - at least that is what I read elsewhere.

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Re:Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 b... by tralarpa on Thursday September 05, 2019 @07:31AM (#20885642)

Are you Danish? (your account name looks rather Dutch)

I always wanted to know whether it's true what I heard some years ago: a friend told me that older Danish people are complaining that the younger Danish are harder to understand because there has been a trend in recent decades to swallow consonants even more than in the past

(that's something hard to image for me as a non-Danish speaker :)

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Re:Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 b... by vanderZwan on Thursday September 05, 2019 @10:12AM (#20886814)

No, I'm Dutch like you guessed. While the Netherlands and Denmark are very similar in some aspects (flat countries obsessed with having the best bike infrastructure in the world) the language is quite different ;)

Living in Malmö I also find this quite hard to believe! Besides, isn't old people complaining about the younger generation butchering their language something that happens all the time in all cultures?

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Re:Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 b... by CRConrad on Thursday September 05, 2019 @01:42PM (#20889084)

This is vague, because it was long ago, but I remember reading an article in a newspaper (Dagens Nyheter, Sweden, IIRC) in... Oh, the 1990s, I think.

It was about how Danish linguists were worried about how the language was getting more unintelligible. The example I remember was about the ever-increasing number of words that are pronounced, basically, “lää'e”: läkare, läge, läger, lager... Those are written in Swedish here; some Dane may translate. (In English: healer, situation, camp [laager], layer...) There were more that I don't remember; in all, I think they mentioned at least half a dozen words that had become basically indistinguishable from each other.

I don't think serious linguists have had the same fear about most other languages.

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