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Can we measure the complexly of natural language by an entropy based compression method? (3)


Complexity of language

I recalled two ideas when we were talking about the difference of languages:

  1. Complexity of language, 
  2. Size of books depends on languages.

My friend (and my teacher), Alexander has a hypothesis: the complexity of all the natural languages is more or less the same. His complexity of a language means the total complexity of a language. It includes number of vocabulary, grammatical structure, representation of writing (complexity of characters), pronunciation, anything. He told us that any language has some difficult aspects, but at the same time, there are some simple aspects also. If we can average all the aspects of each language, and compare them, complexity of natural languages might be almost the same.

I have the same impression about language complexity with Alexander. Each language I have learned has some difficulty and also has some simple part. I also think the complexity of natural language is depends on human brain ability. Because any children can learn any languages (at least speaking and hearing), I expect the complexity of natural languages is more or less the same.

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