[79044] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Entropy of other languages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Travis H.)
Wed Feb 7 13:34:40 2007
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 21:08:07 -0600
From: "Travis H." <travis+ml-cryptography@subspacefield.org>
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Mail-Followup-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <45C67061.7050405@sound-by-design.com>
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On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 03:46:41PM -0800, Allen wrote:
> An idle question. English has a relatively low entropy as a=20
> language. Don't recall the exact figure, but if you look at words=20
> that start with "q" it is very low indeed.
I seem to recall Shannon did some experiments which showed that with a
human as your probability oracle, it's roughly 1-2 bits per letter.
Many of his papers are online last time I looked, but some of his
experimental results are harder to locate online.
> What about other languages? Does anyone know the relative entropy=20
> of other alphabetic languages? What about the entropy of=20
> ideographic languages? Pictographic? Hieroglyphic?
IIRC, it turned out that Egyptian heiroglyphs were actually syllabic,
like Mesopotamian, so no fun there. Mayan, on the other hand, remains
an enigma. I read not long ago that they also had a way of recording
stories on bundles of knotted string, like the end of a mop.
--=20
The driving force behind innovation is sublimation.
-><- <URL:http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/>
For a good time on my UBE blacklist, email john@subspacefield.org.
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