Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Optimum number of symbols

From:David G. Durand <dgd@...>
Date:Friday, May 24, 2002, 16:18
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.