Re: length of text by different languages

From: Yung-Fong Tang (ftang@netscape.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 17:33:09 EST

  • Next message: Yung-Fong Tang: "Re: length of text by different languages"

    Francois Yergeau wrote:

    >ftang@netscape.com wrote:
    >
    >
    >>I remember there were some study to show although UTF-8 encode each
    >>Japanese/Chinese characters in 3 bytes, Japanese/Chinese usually use
    >>LESS characters in writting to communicate information than
    >>alphabetic base langauges.
    >>
    >>Any one can point to me such research?
    >>
    >>
    >
    >I don't know of exactly what you want, but I vaguely remember a paper given
    >at a Unicode conference long ago that compared various translations of the
    >charter (or some such) of the Voice of America in a couple or three
    >encodings. Hmmmm, let's see.... could be this:
    >
    >http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc9/Friday2.html#b3
    >Reuters Compression Scheme for Unicode (RCSU)
    >Misha Wolf
    >
    yea. That could be it. I got a hard copy and it looks like the Fig 2 is
    the one I am looking for.

    >
    >No paper online, alas. I remember that Chinese was a clear winner in terms
    >of # of characters. In fact, I kind of remember that Chinese was so much
    >denser that it still won after RCSU (now SCSU) compression, which would mean
    >that a Han character contains more than twice as much info on average as a
    >Latin letter as used in (say) English.
    >
    >This is all on pretty shaky ground, distant memories. Perhaps Misha stil
    >has the figures (if that's in fact the right paper).
    >
    >
    >



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 06 2003 - 18:33:15 EST