Re: where do so many tenses come from?

Herman Rubin wrote:

In article <874q1a7m8c.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Lee Sau Dan <danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


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

What a big IF!

That is not a big if, and is SLIGHTLY wrong. But it gives
the general idea.

Are you referring to the fact that the number of bits is an integer, while
the information is not necessarily an integer? I thought this deliberate
simplification would not hurt too much in this context.

Joachim
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: where do so many tenses come from?
    ... Joachim> It's an abstract thing. ... Joachim> So you need not model the data source explicitly, ... Joachim> algorithm does it automagically for you. ... compression to achieve the theoretical minimum. ...
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  • Re: where do so many tenses come from?
    ... Joachim> "information". ... General compressions like Winzip do not do approximations. ... Nowadays, they usually use the Deflate algorithm, which is a variant ... approach the entropy of a data source ...
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