Re: where do so many tenses come from?

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Joachim Pense wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Joachim Pense wrote:

Am Sun, 02 Apr 2006 14:01:31 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

Ruud Harmsen wrote:

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 09:06:58 GMT: "John Atkinson"
<johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

Hawaiian, and other Polynesian languages, are slower
because of the lack of phonemes.

Are they slower?

One would expect them to be faster, in terms of phonemes per
seconds, because each of their phonemes contain fewer bits of
information, as there aren't so many different ones.

That means that each one carries _more_ information.

No, less. You need more phonemes to transport the same amount of
information, so each one carries less.

Syntagmatics vs. paradigmatics.

Information theory gives the standard definition of "information". The
information of a sign (in this case a phoneme) within a sequence of signs
is the negative dyadic logarithm of the probability that this sign occurs
in this position.

You can describe it as the number of bits you need to encode it if your
coding system is optimized to produce optimally short bit strings for the
data source (=language in our case).

So if there are less signs to choose from, then for each the probability
to occur in any given position is higher (on average), so the information
is less.

I guess this definition encloses both syntagmatics and paradigmatics.

I guess it doesn't: it's irrelevant, since a phoneme isn't a sign.

Then forget about calling it a sign. Call it a segment or whatever. The
definition applies to all sequences of elements of a finite set, the naming
is irrelevant.

Joachim

Joachim
.

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