No Stupid Questions

35721 readers

2096 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

218

I notice Indians speaking English tend to speak very fast. Are the Indian languages simply spoken faster? (self.nostupidquestions)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by someguy3 to c/nostupidquestions

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there's a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower.

This is true.

Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.

I don't think that's the right interpretation. There are words in English that would require sentences to be made for each if conveyed in a different language. But the same is true vice-versa.

Have a look at subtitles for movies from one language to any other. Translators struggle conveying what should be paragraph long sentences of context behind a single word for one language. Do not get me started on double speak.

[–] ilinamorato 2 points 8 months ago

Oh, interesting. I hadn't considered that there would be variances in information density within a language, but that makes sense; "truth" is a very loaded concept that means a lot of different things in context, even though it's only one syllable; but on the other hand "authenticity" is five syllables but carries with it a meaning that is a subset of the definition of "truth."

I guess that's why subtitling is even possible in different languages; if there were languages with vastly less information density than the source language, they'd need a whole screen just for the captions.