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A comment on Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second. Parent comment

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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