Re: Optimum number of symbols

At 8:53 PM +0000 5/23/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>Another factoid for the mix: subtitles for movies in Chinese and
>>Japanese are much more complete than those in alphabetic writing
>>systems, because reading speed for logographic scripts is higher in
>>terms of words-per-time-unit. The inarguable difficulty of learning
>>such a system does have some payoff. Further, even more than in the
>>case of English, the Chinese writing system unifies a set of _very_
>>divergent dialects, that would are mutually unintelligible at the
>>phonemic level.
>
>Are you sure that this is the reason for fuller subtitles in Japanese and
>Chinese than in Western languages?
Obviously I am not. I don't think anyone is. The lack of hard
experimental data is something that makes discussion like this fun,
but distinguishes it from scholarship; to really answer these
questions would be the work of many careers.  To even gather the
existing relevant publications and evaluate them would be the work of
months or years, I expect, especially since much data may be buried
in relatively obscure non-English publications..

>The main reason I find this slightly difficult to believe is that my own
>main trouble with subtitles (in English and Swedish) is that the damn things
>come too slow - I either waste mental effort at not reading them several
>times, or do and have trouble fitting sentenses together. I would usually
>find it a substantial improvement if the subtitles went blank for half of
>the normal showing time. Now I'm a fast reader, but not a spectacularly fast
>one. So I'm thinking the difference may be that Westerners make the things
>slow so that even bad readers can follow, while the Japanese and Chinese
>concentrate at maximize enjoyability for average readers. A cultural
>difference unrelated to script, that'd be.
It could be. I read the claim in (I believe) Geoffrey Leech's
(Pullum's?) book on writing systems, or possibly a book on Chinese
published in the Pelican linguistics series... I have observed that
Chinese subtitles are both faster, and contain many more words
(assuming 2-3 Hanzi/word, as a nonreader of Chinese).

As I said, it's suggestive, not proof.