



Which tongues work best for microblogs?

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What is the English translation of Twitterbird's metremenkemet utterance that has the Sinophone flying eyeball so confounded? Looks like 'ba'ijaranad' but its meaning is lost on me...


Ah,Tweeting is rly a effective and efficient way to protect rare language before it vanished. Researchers can also have access to studying them.


Classical Chinese would make Twitter even more useful. Four characters in Classical Chinese is equivalent to a full sentence of seven or eight characters of a modern Chinese language. Not to mention a more rigorous grammar. The packed efficiency makes me wonder why the Chinese started trending towards the modern languages of today.
A con of utilizing Chinese characters is the font and size. At times, I had to enlarge the font of the page to be able to recognize the characters used.


Isn't the whole point of micro-blogging to limit the amount of information that can be relayed at one time with a completely arbitrary character limit? It's not like micro-blogging exists in order to conserve bandwidth.

If the point of micro-blogging were, in fact, to use the least bandwidth or screen real-estate, then yes, Chinese is an ideal micro-blogging language.

If, however, the point is to enforce conciseness, then it is not any more ideal for microblogging than any other language.

Brian V in reply to guest-ilswijs

I agree. The article also fails to take into account that each character requires several key strokes to form, though this is obscured in the final sentence. If English could use .gifs for every unit of meaning, i.e. go + ing = 2 .gifs then Chinese's edge would be reduced.

Connect The Dots

I have a proposal to make English more brief and efficient for the Twitter Era:
-Lose all vowels, except for first letter vowels
-Eliminate the word spaces
-Each new word begins with a capital.

It requires a little work but is still somewhat intelligible.




It cuts down sentence space by 30-50%.


A similar analysis would be interesting applied to spoken languages, rather than written. In that case I believe the number of syllables has to be counted instead. And English, which for instance has very long monosyllabic words, is still advantageous over latin languages (e.g.: Italian syllables are never longer than 3 letters).

SeryyVolk in reply to 985

An interesting thought. A way to "tweet" a representation of sound without the sounds themselves, possibly coding sound with the International Phonetic Alphabet might be possible, but extending it to such things as tone would be needed. Coding the "signs" of sign language might also be profitable. I speak only enough Italian to help me travel and enjoy the country, but the first word that I thought of was "ciao," which I think is one syllable and has four letters. Of course, it has only three sounds.

I think that many English words are polysyllabic. I might have used the word "romance" instead of Latin, because many of the modern romance languages incorporated elements of other Italic languages rather than classical Latin. One such as Ladin (Ladinish" as the Germans call it, that I encountered while skiing in the Dolomites seem to have been spoken long before The Roman Empire made Latin a standard.

There is also a problem when the sounds of one language have quite a different meaning in another. I do speak Russian, and there is an anecdote about Russian sailors on a submarine passing by Italy and listening to to the song, "Amore" on the local radio. Ivan says to Oleg: "Listen, they are singing a song about the sea..." I write the name of the sea song in lookalike Cyrillic with Latin letters. "O Mope."

Thanks for the provocative post.

985 in reply to SeryyVolk

Yes, I'm sorry, though being Italian, on that day I had a mental void, which disallowed me to figure out any syllable longer than 3 characters! :-) There are more than a few indeed.

And also, by latin languages I meant romance languages.

Thanks for your enthusiastic reply!

Eric Bana

Evidently there are two linguistic system. One is composed of Hieroglyphics characters like Chinese,way like,"人"(two legs) mean human being,another is from Latin like English. Comparing them,Hieroglyphics characters can express more using less characters but it's inconvenient on programming.


If Gamilaraay,an indigenous Australian language,has only 3 living speakers and only one is tweeting who is he/she tweeting to ? Outer space ?

SeryyVolk in reply to legen

I have friends who won't even do email. Perhaps the tweeter knows the other two and is trying to strike up a conversation. The situation for him/her is better than for those who transmit to extraterrestrial aliens in outer space. The Gamilaraay speakers are known to exist, but aren't answering. The aliens may not exist. On to the other hand, they may be reading the human signals but might just not be interested.


This is a very interesting subject. In an earlier time, people used many standard abbreviations in writing formally in English.

Even before the internet, the Chinese, as well as others who used or understood characters, could communicate with the Chinese Telegraphic Code.


This system provided for 10,000 characters encoded with a four digit decimal number, (0000 to 9999). Even people who don't understand the language but who had a code book in their own language may look up the character and read its meanings from the number. This would take 2 bytes to encode each character; there would be room for additional characters and emoticons. Conceptually, the two byte system could be used for 65536 emoticons.

I understand that some British consulates still require people with names written in Chinese characters to write their names in the telegraphic code for identification.

There are other coding methods with advantages beyond brevity. Unicode, which takes four bytes to encode a single character is useful for encoding in most writing systems in use in the world.


You may have noticed a warning about it when sending a message with foreign writing.

There are coding methods possible with even more brevity. The fingers of one hand may be tapped or pressed on a recording surface (think of the keys of a piano) in 31 different ways. That's enough to send lower case letters in most languages.


A wonderful chart.

Not just in Weibo (microblog), Chinese writing was developed over thousands of years ago when writing or making imprint was difficult.

As a result and over time, a most scientific writing system was evolved, as it is so structured that it literally needs no punctuation marks without losing its meaning (to a causally trained eye) and is independent of speaking variations or changes that must have been happening continuously over the course of time and locals, a fitting feature for man-machine communication or computer language application in fact.

Succinct, precise, brevity in beauty are the key operatives and essence of classical Chinese writing.

Most Chinese classics are so written and that’s one of the reasons why Chinese can read books, letters and document today written hundreds or thousands of years ago without much difficulty.

Weibo provides a rejuvenation of classical Chinese writing, along with new inventions of sort of internetnese in Chinese. A rather nice modern play of innovation over the legacy of Chinese writing of human kind treasures indeed, IMO.

Human Child in reply to nkab

You should read RLG's (the Johnson blogger) book You Are What You Speak. No language, written or spoken, is intrinsically superior to another.

Also, just last week I was given a counter-example to this statement of yours: "why Chinese can read books, letters and document today written hundreds or thousands of years ago without much difficulty."
I separately showed a 120 year-old piece of writing to two Chinese friends of mine, both told me it was VERY hard to understand for them, partly because the characters have evolved, partly because there is no punctuation, partly because the language has evolved.

I know I shouldn't reply to your posts, but I had to bite this time.


The first sentence could be shorted in chinese: 此七十八字英语推若用中文仅十六字

16 characters = 32 bytes

alyc in reply to 海の王

Great job : ) I was going to post my version which shortened it to 19 characters but you beat me.

Actually can shorten it still to 15 characters if in lieu of 七十八, use 78 as in the English version.

Chinese is harder to learn but once you learnws it, it can be much faster to read and write in it. I have lived for more years in the U.S. than in China and I read and write English for a living, but I am still a faster reader in Chinese. I think one reason is mechanical -- the amount of space to be scanned is smaller in Chinese.

alyc in reply to alyc

one thing to add -- writing Chinese by hand is not fast at all and I think if one counds the number of strokes instead of characters, Chinese is probably longer than English. But this disadvantage disappears with computer input.

Joyful Cynic

Chinese and Japanese (and I assume many other languages here) require more information per character. One should compare not the number of characters, but the amount of data. Typically, asian character sets use two bytes for each character where western languages use a single byte per character. I would suggest the study is understating the East-Asian languages by half. Is anyone familiar with how Arabic, Urdu, Tagalog, etc are stored?

Jerrycat in reply to Joyful Cynic

The Economist does the count by the final characters shown in a tweet.

Even if considering so-called double bytes, the English tweet, cited in the Economist article, has 78 characters, while the Chinese one has still only 24*2, which is 48.

André_Schappo in reply to Joyful Cynic

Twitter and Sina Wēibó Web Systems use Unicode UTF8. Assuming text is also stored as Unicode UTF8, which it most likely is, then:

Arabic requires 2 bytes
Chinese requires 3 bytes
Latin requires 1 byte for basic characters (ASCII) but requires 2 bytes for other Latin characters. eg e requires 1 byte but é requires 2 bytes


'Micro-bloggers ... wrote “Bo” in English'---as opposed to writing “Bo” in Spanish, is it?

SeryyVolk in reply to Jerrycat

The Latin alphabet isn't particularly good at conveying the sound of words to others. The Poles and Lithuanians are now in a highly emotional fight in Spanishover differences in the writing of their languages, particularly the lack of the letter "W" in Lithuanian.

Choosing "B" as an example is interesting.

The letter "B" represents a different sound in English and Spanish.

In Spanish as with Russian and modern Greek, what looks like "B" sounds more like "V." To write the sound of "B" in modern Greek, the Greeks use a mu followed by a pi.


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