Letter on a Paper by Eugene Schwartz and Adrienne Kleiboemer
In a recent paper, Schwartz and Kleiboemer (1967) aim at finding the conditions under which incorporation of composite words in a word dictionary results in increased compression efficiency. The conditions they find are asserted to be necessary and sufficient. It is the purpose of this letter "to show that the conditions they obtain are not necessary and to indicate that the range of validity of their sufficiency is, in most cases, too restricted to be useful. Let us adopt the total number of bits required to encode a given sample of text as a measure of the compression efficiency obtained by the use of a certain dictionary. This measure also seems to be the one implicitly used by Schwartz and Kleiboemer. The failure of the necessity of the conditions follows then f r o m Schwartz and Kleiboemer's omission to consider the total number of dictionary look-ups required to encode the sample. In fact, let W be the total number of simple words in the given sample (number of look-ups in the word dictionary), W' be the total number of composite words in the given sample (number of look-ups in the composite word dictionary), L be the total number of letters in the given sample, B be the total number of bits necessary to encode the given sam= ple when simple words are used, B' be the total number of bits necessary to encode the given sample when composite words are used. We say that encoding with a composite-word dictionary is more efficient, with respect to the given sample, than encoding with a simple-word dictionary, if B' < B. But,
A Language Element for Compression Coding
It has been a matter of convenience that language codes have utilized statistical aspects of easily identified language elements such as letters and words although there is no a priori reason to indicate that these are the natural elements of coding in the brain. Other aspects of total redundancy including m-word elements and grammatical constraints are considered in this paper. Conditions are established under which greater compression is achieved by mapping m-words from a source language into a single code word. The results of tests which utilized several language elements are reported and suggestions are made for utilizing some of the techniques of mechanical translation to achieve maximum compression.
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele. Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation. Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.