In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary.
This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well).
And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.
For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken.
"I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.
The first three are grammatical, not so much the last three. I agree most speakers of English (native or otherwise) could figure out what someone saying the last three intends. But you're saying that this is a special fact about English. That if I attempt to speak in 'broken Spanish' or 'broken Japanese' and produce the equivalent of 'me want food' in Spanish or Japanese, that Spanish and Japanese speaker would just shrug their shoulders and say 'who knows what he means'?
It's a general property of natural language that speakers can produce ungrammatical sentences and yet be understood by other (perhaps more fluent) speakers. English isn't special that way.
I can't comment on Japanese, but broken Spanish can be confusing (to me) due to verb conjugations. Conjugations are also a major sticking point for new learners of the language since they have a big impact on meaning but can be hard to remember.
For example, changing a single letter in "quiero" ("I want") can have a big impact on its meaning by becoming "quiere" ("He/she wants") and "quieres" ("you want").
But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.
"Man chased the woman" and "woman chased the man" have completely different meanings in English. In many languages, switching around the two nouns like that wouldn't necessarily change the meaning, and in others you'd at least be able to pick out that something had gone wrong.
The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example.
I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is.
All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.
I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English.
Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.
Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents.
Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down).
It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.
> Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.
That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.]
This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well).
And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.