I think it’s true that some languages have lower information per syllable than others (Spanish is supposedly an example).
The technical term isn’t exactly bandwidth in this case, but information content. And yes, there are differences, even between related languages. German has a much higher redundancy (=uses more characters or bits) than English, for instance.
Yes, I was rather speaking in metaphor.
But of course ‘concepts’ are harder to quantify than data in the Shannon sense.
There are a lot of interesting ideas here, and I’m sure work has been done.
One can consider written languages, and see how many characters are used in various languages to convey a paragraph of equivalent information (assuming a ‘good’ translation).
I have the impression that the variance is something like a factor of 2 at most… but as I said, I’m not a linguist.
Then consider how long a native speaker would need to convey this in their own language.
(Assuming of course that it is in some sense a ‘complete’ language and does not need to use circumlocutions borrowed from others). Again, I’m guessing no more than a factor of 2?
This is a fascinating field to study!
I agree. I’m kind of a network engineer myself, though it’s called something different here in Germany, I’m an electrical engineer who specialized in college in “Nachrichtentechnik”, which roughly means telecommunications. A part of our studies was information theory that touched on these questions, though of course rather from a technical than a linguistic point. I always found these subjects exciting. But that was more than 30 years ago, and in my professional life I hadn’t much opportunities to apply those studies, so I have forgotten most of it.
Yeah, I think English benefits from not having any formal requirements for precision. I might say ‘looks weathery’ to someone and they might understand this to mean ‘I’ve checked the weather and it appears that it may be adverse with respect to our plans’
Maybe we could find something in considering the senses we have, but don’t really pay much active attention to? I’m not speaking here of fanciful psychic abilities, but stuff that we use so automatically that we don’t even notice them as something separate from the big five.
Equilibrioception - The sense of balance. (Okay, not sure what more we could do with this, beyond noting that some people are really good at it, but I’m kind of obligated to lead with it.)
Proprioception - Awareness of the location of parts of our own bodies. If you shut your eyes and hold out your left hand, palm inward, you can easily extend your right hand and poke the middle of your left palm with the index finger. That’s proprioception at work. Phantom limb syndrome is likely related. Training ourselves to extend that awareness might enable us to use tools (physical or in virtual spaces) more fluidly. Certainly, my weapons instructors have often told me to try to feel a knife or cane as an extension of my hand.
Kinaesthesia - Sense of personal movement. Athletes often focus on this in personal ways, but maybe we could use wider study of it. Maybe it could help us sort out those more efficient gaits we’d all like.
Nociception - Pain sense. We’d be in trouble without it, but I can’t say I’d want to train to get better at using it.
Thermoception - Temperature sense. Possible edge here: when you need to sleep, your body tries to drop your core temperature slightly, which causes you to perceive things as slightly warmer. Maybe we could leverage that to improve sleep efficiency in some small way?
Chronoception - Sense of duration. Complicated and likely tied up with biological cycles, but some people definitely have a knack for knowing exactly what time it is. Might be another candidate for improving sleep if we got a better handle on it.
Other - Sense of air movement. I call it “faz”, because that’s the name the Thranx had for it in Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth novels, but it’s probably just a narrow application of the main tactile sense. It’s the one place where I can claim a small practical triumph for all this, in that I have actively used it in blind fighting practice. If you pay attention to it, you can–to a limited extent–detect the pressure wave of someone moving behind you, or the occlusion of an existing air current when something moves in its way. A little extra warning of something or someone approaching you from behind is not a bad tiny superpower, and it doesn’t require any fantasy abilities.
Nice username/post combo!
When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I left my hair uncut and grew it long for a couple of years. I was persuaded by my workmates to let people sponsor me to shave it all off for charity. The day after it was all shaved, I could sense people near me (up to maybe 5 metres away) by feeling their radiated body heat landing on my scalp. This ability didn’t persist - I shave my head frequently now and I can’t usually feel people walking by; I think it was probably just because my scalp was so well insulated with a huge mop of hair, then was suddenly exposed to new sensations.
You indirectly reminded me of another thermoception trick I haven’t had occasion to use lately: distinguishing between different metals or other mineral materials by sensing their thermal properties. A piece of polished steel feels very different from polished aluminum, just as diamond, glass, and plastic feel different–all because of differences in their specific heat and thermal conductivity. I’m sure it could be refined to greater precision than I’ve ever used it.
Small nitpick, but a pet peeve of mine: written Chinese is logographic, not ideographic. Each character represents a syllable, not an idea. True ideographs are things like international traffic signs, where everyone who reads it understands the idea of “do not enter” or “pedestrian crossing” regardless of what language(s) they understand. Chinese characters (and Egyptian hieroglyphics, another system often erroneously called ideographic) transcribe the words of a particular language. I don’t think there is such a thing as a fully ideographic writing system.
It’s been proposed that the writing on the Phaistos Disc could be entirely ideographic, but it’s the only example of its type, so nobody really knows.
Surely the wide range is closely correlated with our modern, sedentary, atrophying, lardifying lifestyle. Every adult mobile hunter-gatherer was supposed to be able to cover considerable distances on foot almost daily, as a basic job requirement for humankind.
Correction noted: as I said, I am not a linguist.
Something like a fully ideographic system might not make sense anyway, since one would need a ridiculously large number of symbols.
Rather like the character in Borges ‘Funes the Memorious’
‘Funes the Memorious - Wikipedia’
who created a unique name for every natural number, completely missing the point of the calculational uses of the positional decimal system.
Something like Human-readable QR codes would be useful. Of course it’s only a symbology for representing text, but if there was a similar method for representing concepts, I mean.
Most humans aren’t very good at calculating big numbers, or juggling complex equations in their heads. But an Excel spreadsheet can calculate quite complex tables quickly and easily.
I’d quite like to be able to do something like that in my head, please.
And there are a whole range of mathematical problems where the answers are counter-intuitive, like the Monty Hall problem. A reliable way of using probabilities and formal logic on demand would also be useful.
The human brain is already extremely good at pattern recognition, so one could imagine the development of a faculty like that.
We call those “memes”. Their principal communicative use is to convey emotional data.
I jest, but I do think emoji, memes, and many other elements of internet communications evolved in response to an instinctive need to reopen communications subchannels that are normally available in face-to-face communication. And in some cases, they increase the bandwidth of those subchannels.
I’ve even written a poem on this subject…for a Doki Doki Literature Club poetry slam challenge. 
I guess this is an argument for a working brain/computer interface: have the computer do the stuff it’s really good at, like complicated number crunching or big data searches, while the brain does the interpretation.
Sure, memes are something like that, but whilst they are quick to read, they’re not quick to create and in terms of communication they really only transmit agreement with something already in circulation.
I’m thinking more of something like a symbology where multiple juxtaposed concepts could be expressed and read in a single glance - and the conceptual components could be recombined in other ways - so each symbol would represent something like an entire phrase, question or sentence.
There’s rather a difference between a meme and an emoji, I think?
The emoji is mostly a symbol which quickly expresses a common well-known response.
Memes, on the other hand, are more complex and can encapsulate an entire belief system.
Like the fictional superhuman languages. Or Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game?