From: John D. Burger (john@mitre.org)
Date: Thu Jun 30 2005 - 10:49:35 CDT
> Apart from what measures might be used, the other question is surely
> 'What is being measured?' From
> your message, particularly the reference to IPA, I suspect that you
> are talking about phonetic economy and accuracy. This is one kind of
> economy/accuracy, but one could also measure at the semantic level, in
> which case 'ideographic' writing systems would presumably be more
> economical.
One measure of this semantic efficiency might be the self-entropy of
the writing system. An intuitive way of thinking about this is to
imagine compressing a large sample of the language with, say, gzip. A
"less economic" language/orthography presumably has more redundancy,
and thus would compress more. The most efficient writing system
imaginable wouldn't compress at all.
See here for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy
- John Burger
MITRE
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