Italian represents, I believe, the most phonetically advanced human language. It has the right compromise among information density, understandability, and ability to speech much faster to compensate the redundancy. It's like if it had error correction built-in. Note that it's not just that it has the lower error rate, but is also underrepresented in most datasets.

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nindalf an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I love seeing people from other countries share their own folk tales about what makes their countries special and unique. I've seen it up close in my country and I always cringed when I heard my fellow countrymen came up with these stories. In my adulthood I'm reassured that it happens everywhere and I find it endearing.

On the information density of languages: it is true that some languages have a more information dense textual representation. But all spoken languages convey about the same information in the same time. Which is not all that surprising, it just means that human brains have an optimal range at which they process information.

Further reading: Coupé, Christophe, et al. "Different Languages, Similar Encoding Efficiency: Comparable Information Rates across the Human Communicative Niche." Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

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antirez an hour ago | parent [-]

Different representations at the same bitrate may have features that make one a lot more resilient to errors. This thing about Italian, you fill find in any benchmark of vastly different AI transcribing models. You can find similar results also on the way LLMs mostly trained on English generalize usually very well with Italian. All this despite Italian accounting for marginal percentage of the training set. How do you explain that? I always cringe when people refute evidence.

	▲	testdelacc1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Where is this evidence you’ve cited for your claims?

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Archelaos 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is largely due to the fact that modern Italian is a systematised language that emerged from a literary movement (whose most prominent representative is Alessandro Manzoni) to establish a uniform language for the Italian people. At the time of Italian unification in 1861, only about 2.5% of the population could speak this language.

	▲	gbalduzzi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The language itself was not invented for the purpose: it was the language spoken in Florence, than adopted by the literary movement and than selected as the national language. It seems like the best tradeoff between information density and understandability actually comes from the deep latin roots of the language

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gbalduzzi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was honestly surprised to find it in the first place, because I assumed English to be at first place given the simpler grammar and the huge dataset available.

I agree with your belief, other languages have either lower density (e.g. German) or lower understandability (e.g. English)

	▲	riffraff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		English has a ton of homophones, way more sounds that differ slightly (long/short vowels), and major pronunciation differences across major "official" languages (think Australia/US/Canada/UK). Italian has one official italian (two, if you count IT_ch, but difference is minor), doesn't pay much attention to stress and vowel length, and only has a few "confusable" sounds (gl/l, gn/n, double consonants, stuff you get wrong in primary school). Italian dialects would be a disaster tho :)

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hackyhacky 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the most phonetically advanced human language

That's interesting. As a linguist, I have to say that Haskell is the most computationally advanced programming language, having the best balance of clear syntax and expressiveness. I am qualified to say this because I once used Haskell to make a web site, and I also tried C++ but I kept on getting errors.

/s obviously.

Tldr: computer scientists feel unjustifiably entitled to make scientific-sounding but meaningless pronouncements on topics outside their field of expertise.

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NewsaHackO 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The only knowledge I have about how difficult Italian is comes from Inglourious Basterds.

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mmooss 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At least some relatively well-known research finds that all languages have similar information density in terms of bits/second (~39 bits/second based on a quick search). Languages do it with different amounts of phonetic sound / syllables / words per bit and per second, but the bps comes out the same.

I don't know how widely accepted that conclusion is, what exceptions there may be, etc.