Noah Brier dot Com

1

Short Words, Short Data

Earlier this year I remember reading this short article from MIT on some research that showed word length had more to do with information being communicated than frequency of occurrence. Ran across it again and thought it was worth sharing:

Why are some words short and others long? For decades, a prominent theory has held that words used frequently are short in order to make language efficient: It would not be economical if “the” were as long as “phenomenology,” in this view. But now a team of MIT cognitive scientists has developed an alternative notion, on the basis of new research: A word’s length reflects the amount of information it contains.

The article goes on to explain, “For English words, 9 percent of the variation in length is due to amount of information, and 1 percent stems from frequency.” Not entirely sure what to do with this yet, but seems worth knowing.

languagesciencewordsNovember 27, 2011

2

Dropping the Vowel

At dinner this evening Leila and I got into a conversation about Italian words losing the last vowel (mozzarell instead of mozzarella). If you’re not from the New York area this will sound crazy, but it’s pretty common here (I remember hearing it growing up in Connecticut as well).

When I got home I tried to track down an article I remember reading years ago about this phenomena and while I can’t remember whether this was it, a New York Times article from 2004 offers up some ideas on how this happened:

In fact, in some parts of Italy, the dropping of final vowels is common. Restaurantgoers and food shoppers in the United States ended up imitating southern and northern dialects, where speakers often do not speak their endings, Professor Albertini said.

Liliana Dussi, a retired New York district director for the Berlitz language schools, said many first- and second-generation Italians whose ancestors immigrated to the United States before World War I were informally taught Italian expressions and the names of food, some of which has ended up part of everyday language in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

If you want more, this Chowhound thread is pretty excellent.

cultureitalianlanguageNYCNovember 20, 2011