Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

On 7/17/07, John Crowe <johnxcrowe@...> wrote:
> Efficiency (use less space/time to convey the same amount of info) in
> conlangs is one of my newer interests, and I don't know much about this
> idea. What is the formal name for this? What are the results of formal
> studies/works in this area? All of the ideas in this post are just from my
> own thought; I have read few things by other authors about this.
....
> I have read some essays concerning half-related topics, it seems that a lot
> of people that human language cannot be made more efficient. "Amiguity is
> necessary."
How much redundancy [not ambiguity] is necessary probably depends
on the channel -- how noisy it is.  If you're a perfect typist then your
written language can have very low redundancy, but if typos are not
terribly uncommon you need more.  Spoken language can afford
to be more compact and less redundant in quiet surroundings
than in noisy.

We talked about this on the list last May in connection with
Sai Emrys's "On the Design of an Ideal Language".

http://archives.conlang.info/co/boerghin/shianquelkhuen.html

> Even after setting aside human read/parseability, it still seems hard to
> draw the line. Theoretically, if a language has maximum efficiency, then
> there must be no such thing as an incomplete utterance or an ungrammatical
> statement, i.e. every possible utterance (or combination of symbols) within
> the rules means something.
I am not sure that this follows.  Or if it does, it seems a reductio ad absurdum
of the idea of a perfectly efficient language.  A language with zero
redundancy would be highly brittle, such that any amount of noise
would make an utterance mean something different, equally grammatical
and meaningful -- is that really "efficient" in any meaningful sense?

>Then again, if a language has ungrammatical
> utterances, then we can make it a 'rule' that all of the previously
> ungrammatical utterances are not part of the language, that they are akin to
> using phonemes or symbols other than those specified.
I am not sure what you mean here by "previously ungrammatical utterances".

Ungrammatical utterances seem to be by definition not part of a given
language, but in a different way than utterances made up of speech sounds
that are not used in the language, or utterances that use the language's
phonemes to form phonological words which aren't assigned any meaning
in the lexicon of the language.


My own engelang, tentatively called "säb zjed'a", is to use an iterative relex
methodology to gradually converge on whatever degree of efficiency is
consistent with the goal of noise-resistance.

http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/conlang13/intro.htm

The idea is to start with a minimalist lexicon and gradually modify
and expand it based on corpus analysis, replacing frequent compounds/phrases
with short words and infrequent root words with longer forms.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry