What written language conveys the most information with the least characters?

Factual Questions
41

[QUOTE=Napier]
I think these are the two logical extremes:

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, more accurately, a well done painting or photograph can convey a great deal, albeit with ambiguity. If characters or ideographs or symbols can be carried to an extreme, let the picture be one character. For that matter, I read somewhere that we interpret written text in English a word at a time when we read, or even read some phrases without parsing the words per se. Not surprising - you read “you” so many times in a lifetime that you can easily recognize the shape of the word itself.

[QUOTE=Napier]

As you can see below, we really don’t have to read each letter in the correct order to understand the meaning of a sentence.

O lny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.

cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,

it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

42

I think mathematical equations convey a huge amount of information, with very few characters:
2 X 2= 4
Think about it!

43

Mangosteen: One can just as easily find a string of English words for which that trick doesn’t work at all.

44

Monty

I’m not sure why you are characterizing the Cambridge study as a “trick”. Their point was that only the first and last letters of the words in a sentence need to be in the correct order. I could see that a sentence with a few words that were unusually long might be a little difficult to decipher, but most of the time it works.

Lets look at my reply to you.

I’m not srue why you are crterahcaiinzg the Cmraibdge sdtuy as a “ticrk”. Tiher pinot was taht olny the frsit and lsat lterets of the wrods in a strecnee need to be in the crrocet odrer. I culod see taht a srtceene wtih a few wrods taht wree usunlaluy lnog mhgit be hrad to dhepceir, but msot of the tmie it wrkos.

45

That is not clearly true.

Can you provide an example of English prose “scrambled” in this way which is hard to make out?

It occurs to me you may have in mind, not prose, but literally just a string of random words. (Your post does say just “a string of words” after all.) But providing an example like that would not damage Mangosteen’s point. I take his/her point to be about what generally happens when we’re reading words in a normal context. It would be silly to claim that we never decipher a word by taking into account the order in which its letters appear.

-FrL-

46

You misspelled “sntceene.”

(And BTW it really tripped up my reading of the passage–more so than would have the corresponding “normal” misspelling “senterce” in a “normal” English text. This goes to show, I think, that both context and letter-order are important disambiguators. But your main point is correct: the “first thing we do” when reading is just take in the letters in a word as an unordered group except for the first and last letter.

I wonder if anyone’s tried scrambling Chinese characters in a similar fashion to see what happens.)

-FrL-

47

Right, but they are only “assumed words” if you are thinking in the mindset of an English-speaker

48

Cela n’est pas français.

49

Good point. To explain the statement, “the topological product of compact spaces is compact” would take the better part of a book.

50

Okay, I’ll bite. (Though I know you weren’t fishing.)

How do you multiply spaces?

-FrL-

51

Here is something I just found that’s understandable (to me at least), Frylock. Check out Definition 1.10.

52

I almost feel like I should have known that without asking. My excuse is, I was visualizing weird complicated spaces, not thinking about what it would (sort of obviously) mean to multiply flat spaces.

Thanks for the link!

I’m interested to know what happens when you multiply a donut by a 4-plane. :slight_smile:

A 6-donut?

-FrL-

53

Not exactly a written language in the context of the OP, but American Sign Language is very compact and strongly resembles Chinese in its absence of many “filler” words… most prepositions and modifiers are either implied by context, or integral to the particular hand form. So if one were to consider a particular hand form as equating to a single word, then I think ASL may be a contender.

54

ASL is a written language.

55

Maybe because there was no Cambridge study?

Or because they carefully rearranged the letters to make parsing easier? Or because none of the rearranged words made other words? Or because the sentences contained a lot of 2 and 3-letter words (no change) and 4-letter words (the only change is swapping the 2nd and 3rd letters)? Or because the rearranging doesn’t make the word look like it would be pronounced differently?

Notice how “phenomenal” turned into “phaonmneal” and not “pnnamoheal”? And how the words at the beginning of the sentence where you need context changed less than the words near the end of the sentence, where you can guess at what’s coming?

Yes, there’s a real phenomenon there, but falsely attributing it to a Cambridge study and exaggerating the results doesn’t do much for fighting ignorance.

56

:smack: (that’s ASL for ‘doh!’). Cool site, color me informed!

57

Nice link there! I shall show it to everyone I know.

Also, IMO, there was no need for your final paragraph. The idea that there was a study at Cambridge about this etc. is so well-entrenched that people who perpetuate the claim are generally to be excused. What reason did Mangetout have not to think it was true that there was such a study done at that University? Very little.

-FrL-

58

I didn’t mean that to be a potshot at Mangetout. I just get upset with people who feel the need to doctor up an urban legend email before they forward it. The original was cute. Someone along the way decided to add the Cambridge bit to it.

Forwarding along a U.L. email can be attributed to a desire to spread what you honestly believe to be valid facts–you’re just too lazy to verify them. Actually MODIFYING a U.L. email to try and make it more believable is despicable. It’s propagating a problem and creating new ignorance along the way.

59

Mathematics is indeed concise, but has difficulty in expressing “The epistemological sense in which meta-semantic structure influences how the human mind formulates ideas deserves more consideration than has heretofore been given it” or “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”

Let us not fall into the trap of mistaking symbology for language. Either the Letters of Tolkien or Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of him has a photo of an inscription on a book’s frontispiece, in which Tolkien, for a lark, wrote a note to the book’s recipient in English written in his Elvish runes. PECTOPAH is a perfectly good word in Russian – but also in English – it’s pronounced “restauran’” (the final T being silent).

60

Old thread, I know, but I thought of it when I got this error message from Google Adsense.