RE: VMs: glossolalia

["Don Latham" <djl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bonjour, Jean:  I found an old but OK book by John R. Pierce, title An Introduction to Information Theory, Symbols, signals and noise, second edition. It was published by Dover Publications. It is still available from, for example, Amazon at a very reasonable price.  Has a very nice section on Zipf's law and other language applications, and is easy to read.

Don

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of jean-yves artero
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 1:18 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: VMs: glossolalia

Hi Don,

You wrote:

In the Psych field, glossolalia is called "word salad". a search did not readily turn up a sample, but there are interesting ideas on:

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000525.html

According to information theory, English is about 85% redundant, probably indicates something about
how noisy our verbal communication channels are. Rap, anyone? :-)
Don

Here is an excerpt of the very interesting web site you mentionned about glossolalia:

"From a conversation you are not listening to it seems you can also pick up other keywords, but not that many. This is however an attention phenomenon, not one of speech recognition.

However, the mention of background noise brings up memories of Shannon?s (and Shannon & Weaver?s) work on the subject. (short summary; link where you can find the download (check page 7f)) Shannon estimated the redundancy of English to be around 50% (it?s probably even higher)".

I personally think that Shannon's work is paramount in general and perhaps in VMS case especially; is there somewhere an article or a book where the basic principles of his thought are to be found, and which would be at least partly understandable for a poor French cow boy (for instance)?

Jean

 

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