Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?
Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?
Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower. Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
Is there anything to that? Or was that just nonsense?
Someone posted a link to just that topic here. Apparently almost all languages transmit about 39 bits per second of data. Italians use 9 syllables per second, Germans only about 5-6, but both convey the same amount of information per second. But, not all syllables are equal. Japanese has about 5 bits per syllable, English has about 7 bits per syllable. The most information dense language per syllable is apparently Vietnamese with about 8 bits per syllable.
Apparently though, the bottleneck is the brain. The end result seems to be that languages that have fewer “bits of data” per syllable say those syllables more quickly, and the ones with fewer bits of data per syllable say those syllables more slowly, so that the average is about 39 bits per second no matter what the language.
Having said that, I often listen to podcasts sped up to 1.5x speed, and I listen to podcasts while doing other things, so I guess the bottleneck is probably on the sending side rather than the receiving side.
Does anyone know how the amount of information is actually derived? The article just says “researchers calculated”
Podcasts, being prerecorded and edited, don’t really fit this model. It’s more for a conversation with a back and forth where both interlocutors don’t know ahead of time what the other person will say. So they need to observe/listen, reflect while also coming up with answers and putting effort into being properly understood. So basically the natural context in which inter human communication evolved.
Fairly nonsense If anything I’d say it’s the other way around – there are lots of words in Hindi/Malayalam that you need 5 or 6 English words to describe
It’s not nonsense. Information density isn’t about number of words. It’s about duration and complexity of communication. And it is fairly consistent across all languages. Some languages take 3 words to say something the other can say in one, but those 3 words probably take a similar amount of brainpower and time to communicate as the one word.