Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > 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. As a very rough proxy, look at the length of the same text in different translations. My father was in advertising in Europe. When they laid out a print ad, they always did so using the German text. If the German fit, any other language they were interested in would do so as well. Now that I work (among other things) on cellphone applications, I'm running into similar issues in internationalizing text on tiny screens. Peter Trei Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion. It may or may not jibe with my employer's opinion. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]