On Sun, 04 Feb 2007 15:46:41 -0800 Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi gang, > > An idle question. English has a relatively low entropy as a language. > Don't recall the exact figure, but if you look at words that start > with "q" it is very low indeed. > > What about other languages? Does anyone know the relative entropy of > other alphabetic languages? What about the entropy of ideographic > languages? Pictographic? Hieroglyphic? > It should be pretty easy to do at least some experiments today -- there's a lot of online text in many different languages. Have a look at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ for freely-available books that one could mine for statistics.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]