FW: Entropy of other languages

[Trei, Peter]

Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 04 Feb 2007 15:46:41 -0800
> Allen <netsecurity at sound-by-design.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi gang,
> > 
> > An idle question. English has a relatively low entropy as a
> language.
> > Don't recall the exact figure, but if you look at words that start 
> > with "q" it is very low indeed.
> > 
> > What about other languages? Does anyone know the relative entropy of

> > other alphabetic languages? What about the entropy of ideographic 
> > languages? Pictographic? Hieroglyphic?
> > 
> It should be pretty easy to do at least some experiments today -- 
> there's a lot of online text in many different languages.  Have a look

> at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ for freely-available books that 
> one could mine for statistics.

As a very rough proxy, look at the length of the same text in different
translations. 

My father was in advertising in Europe. When they laid out a print ad,
they always did so using the German text. If the German fit, any other
language they were interested in would do so as well.

Now that I work (among other things) on cellphone applications, I'm
running into similar issues in internationalizing text on tiny screens.

Peter Trei

Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion. It may or may not jibe with my
employer's opinion.


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