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From: dcs2e@darwin.clas.virginia.edu (David Swanson)
Subject: Re: Languages: Hard, Harder, Hardest
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 19:42:39 GMT
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In article <4t5etk$jj5@news.ox.ac.uk>
patrick@gryphon.psych.ox.ac.uk (Patrick Juola) writes:

> In article <Dv01wK.A8C@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> dcs2e@darwin.clas.virginia.edu (David Swanson) writes:
> >In article <4t271h$cga@news.ox.ac.uk>
> >patrick@gryphon.psych.ox.ac.uk (Patrick Juola) writes:
> >
> >> Well, as a professional linguist I have to go with Mr. Silberstein here.
> >> To the best of my knowledge, there is no language into which people
> >> have tried and failed to translate the Bible, and it's commonly enough
> >> translated to serve as a very good base case.  (I can't think of a 
> >> language offhand that has a million words of text translated into it
> >> that do not include at least the Gospel of John.)
> >
> >
> >For chrissake.  There are languages that have no written form.
> 
> That's certainly true.  These languages also tend not to have
> a million words of text translated into them.
> 
> I stand by my (original) statement.  If you can produce a counterexample,
> please do so.



Your "statement" is cleverly ambiguous.  Do people try to translate
into languages quite at random and then either succeed or fail at it,
or do they first make sure it's feasible and then try, and of course
succeed, or is it something in between you have in mind?  That's
rhetorical, you understand.  I'm not particularly interested.




> 
> >> As you point out, "greatly" is of course a matter of opinion.  Please
> >> let me provide some numbers.  Consulting my sources, I have on-line
> >> translations of the Bible in the following languages (with sizes) :
> >> 
> >>         English (NRV)  4,379,692 bytes
> >>         Russian         3,575,074   "
> >>         Dutch           4,542,254   "
> >>         French          4,311,550   "
> >>         Finnish         4,229,221   "
> >>         Maori           4,639,731   "
> >> 
> >> The maximum difference in this case is less than 30% (Maori/Russian), and
> >> notably is a difference between the language with the smallest character
> >> set and the largest, again indicating "conservation of complexity."  On
> >> the basis of this data, representing at least four maximally independent
> >> linguistic groups(*) by the way, I think it's reasonable to conclude
> >> that (scholastic translations of) Bibles don't vary greatly in size.
> >
> >
> >I should have thought 30% was greatly.
> 
> So where do you define "greatly?"  

Um, wherever I use it.

If I strip out all the unused high-order
> bits 

meaning ...?


in Maori, I think that reduces the size by 25% (Maori having
> a fewer-than-64-character writing set), down to 3.48MB; a similar
> transformation on English (12.5% reduction) yields ~3.29MB, a 1%
> difference in Russian/Maori, and a just under 9% difference in 
> Russian/English.
> 
> Given that it's fairly easy to get a >%30 difference in translation
> sizes within the same language, depending upon the target readership,
> I'd be interested to know what you consider a valid measure of
> linguistic complexity.  


What is the connection between what is "given" here and your question? 
I haven't the foggiest idea what in the world you could possibly mean
by "linguistic complexity," but I imagine that however one measures it,
that's what it is.


> 
>         Patrick


David

"Heideggerian hope comes into question." J.D.
