Re: length of text by different languages

From: Ram Viswanadha (ram@jtcsv.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 18:23:21 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: The display of *kholam* on PCs"

    There is also some information at
    http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/docs/papers/binary_ordered_compression_for_unicode.html#Test_Results

    Not sure if this is what you are looking for.

    Regards,

    Ram Viswanadha
      ----- Original Message -----
      From: Yung-Fong Tang
      To: Francois Yergeau
      Cc: unicode@unicode.org
      Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2003 2:33 PM
      Subject: 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 - 19:34:47 EST