Subject: [idn] Re: hi

From: "Adam M. Costello" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 18:31:39 -0700

Soobok Lee <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I suggest you visit the next link which contains The Revelation of the
> Holy Bible in Chinese (GB) and English (Modern BBE and Old KJV).
>
>
http://www.ccim.org/cgi-user/bible/ob?version=hgb&version=kjv&version=bb
e&book=gen
>
> And then, come back to this WG with new estimations on information
> capacity of han letters, please.

In Genesis chapter 1, I counted the Han ideographs in the Chinese Union
version, and the Latin letters in the King James version.  In both cases
I excluded all other characters (punctuation, spaces, verse numbers,
etc).

Chinese ideographs:  778
English letters:    3168

This suggests that each Chinese ideograph carries the information
content of slighly over four English letters.  Therefore a maximal
Chinese domain label in AMC-ACE-Z (19 ideographs, using about 3 octets
each plus 4 octets for the prefix) holds about as much information as
76-letter English string, which is 21% more information than a maximal
English domain label (63 letters using 1 octet each).

The situation is much worse for Korean.  I think each Hangul character
carries the information of only about 1.5 English letters, but still
takes about 2.9 octets in AMC-ACE-Z, which means a maximal Korean domain
label (20 hangul) holds about as much information as a 30-letter English
string.  Of all the languages I've looked at, Korean is by far the least
dense when encoded using AMC-ACE-Z.

AMC

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 12:01:10 +0900

Hello Adam,

At 18:31 01/10/20 -0700, Adam M. Costello wrote:

>carries the information of only about 1.5 English letters,

It may be lower than Chinese, but I'm very surprised it should
be that low. Any pointers to sources? Are they for running text,
or for names? For running text, Korean uses spaces, but Chinese
doesn't, so that already could explain quite a bit of the
difference.

>but still

Even if this were true, a 30-letter limit in English would still be
nothing really bad in actual practice.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: "Bruce Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 14:56:09 +0900

Some Hangul characters are equivalent to only one English vowel,
but most are equivalent to one consonant and one vowel (like
Japanese kana). In addition there many are equivalent to 2 consonants
and 1 vowel so Hangul are more efficient than kana. Perhaps
2.2 English letters per Hangul character at a guess? Also
remember that Kanji are used together with Hangul, which tends
to increase that number.

Bruce

---

From: "Adam M. Costello" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 20:07:30 +0000

Martin Duerst <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > I think each Hangul character carries the information of only about
> > 1.5 English letters,
>
> It may be lower than Chinese, but I'm very surprised it should be that
> low.

You're right.  My estimate must have been based on an anomalous sample.
Here are the counts for Genesis chapter 1:

King James:     3167 letters
Basic English:  3088 letters
Chinese Union:   778 ideographs
Korean Revised: 1201 Hangul

references:
http://www.ccim.org/bible/
http://bible.wisenet.co.kr/

So it's about 4.0 English letters per Chinese ideograph, and about 2.6
English letters per Korean Hangul.

Each Korean Hangul takes about 2.9 octets in AMC-ACE-Z, which means a
maximal Korean domain label (20 hangul) holds about as much information
as a 52-letter English string, which about 17% less information than
a maximal English domain label (63 letters), and about 38% less
information than a maximal Chinese domain label (19 ideographs).

I now retract this statement:

> Of all the languages I've looked at, Korean is by far the least dense
> when encoded using AMC-ACE-Z.

In light of the new data, I doubt that Korean is the least dense.

AMC

---

From: "Soobok Lee" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 00:56:15 +0900

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Adam M. Costello" <[email-masked]>
  You're right.  My estimate must have been based on an anomalous sample.
> English letters per Korean Hangul.

That might have been a hard work. :-)

I know that chinese natural sentences contain many single-chinese-letter
verbs,pronouns,adjectives,adverbs and interrogatives, while most
chinese nouns are in two or three letters. composite chinese nouns
/business names are from combinations of those nouns.

If we take a research on chinese nouns and its corresponding english nouns/
transcriptions, the ratio 4.0 may be reduced to 2.X, i guess.
The ratio 2.6 for Hangul sentence  may be also reduced to lower 2.X, i believe.

I will suggest new source of chinese nouns, later time.
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=chinese+english will help for a while.

Chinese participanst are welcome to this analysis.

Thanks.

Soobok Lee