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Comment by _4jlx | Hacker News Reader

This is also from a study. The gist is that english single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin single-digit numbers (1/3 second vs 1/4 second), and so 9 digits in english be slightly too long to be consistently memorizable for most people.

There are more authoritative sources but this is what I found: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/07/01/137527742/c...

Also, when I say them aloud or in my head, mandarin numbers are clearly shorter.

Upon further research, it seems like Vietnamese is also very information dense.

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>1/3 second vs 1/4 second

I have an instant reaction doubting that statement. Not because the numbers are obviously wrong in themselves or I think you made them up or the source was lying.

It implies a precision such that 1/3 s != 1/4 s. The difference is 80 ms.

To be a meaningful statement, it implies that the speed measured can be characterized to some fraction of 80 ms, and that the variance within english and mandarin speakers is also significantly smaller. I cannot conceive of that being the case.

As a speaker of both languages, when I say the numbers aloud or in my mind the difference is obvious.

>The gist is that English single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin

That has nothing to say, compare it to programming languages, is the language with the least LOC's the best language? No, often its a mix.

You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective. Imagine the world switches to "bobish" tomorrow, which is 20% more efficient than english.

Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster, server costs decrease 20%, data centre energy usage decreases by 20%, greenhouse gases from data centres decrease by 20%, and so global warming slows down by _% and on and on. Sure it won't be 20%, it might not be nearly that in many cases, but think about the magnitude of the rube goldberg of unknown efficiency increases you'll set off.

>You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective

>Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster

Who is thinking from a programmer perspective now? Compression is not always a good thing, and for sure not in natural language.

Why is compression bad in natural language? From reading those vitamin water labels it's clear to me that English still has room to shrink before we experience a substantial hit to readability. 'You' to 'u', 'what' to 'wat', 'phone' to 'fone', etc.

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