You may be amused to know that Claude Shanon once made an estimate of
the entropy (or "information density" if you like) in "typical English"
(not terribly well defined) and as I recall it was somewhere around 2
bits per letter. Also as I recall there have been more recent attempts
(Shanon did that work around 1950) to estimate the information per
character in Chinese but I forget the figure. This is all a bit academic
though as it ignore semantic content. Now how about the information per
second in a "typical" honkyoku piece...
>
> I was fascinated with Ralf's explanation regarding the compresion of
> information in the language, i.e., that the same information generally
> requires more syllables in Japanese than in English. Compression of
> information is generally a fascinating subject anyway, since it is at the
> core of computer technology, encryption, etc. It also deals with human
> cognition, and gathering the "information" presented to us.
>
> Well, going from a serious and fascinating subject to the somewhat
> ridiculous, I decided to try an alpha-numeric haiku, i.e., using only
> letters and numbers to represent words. I include a translation for those
> unfamiliar with the art form:
>
> nvds b Invidious bee
> n nvs lfn; An envious elephant;
> 4n pno Foreign piano
>
> (Hint: It may help to imagine someone with a strong Swedish accent.)
> Well, forgive me, but it is my first effort. It does follow the 5/7/5 rule.
> Does the "bee" satisfy the season rule?
>
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: Ralf Muhlberger <ralf@muhlberger.com>
> Reply-To: Shakuhachi@communication.ucsd.edu
> To: Shakuhachi@communication.ucsd.edu
> Subject: meditation and haiku was Re: Chikuzan
> Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 11:15:33 +1000
>
> >Regarding the 5-7-5 "rule," you've all shown that it can certainly be done
> >in English, but I was reading some translations of Issa and they didn't
> >follow the rule at all.
>
> The difference is that in English 17 syllables carry more
> information than they would in Japanese. Thus to be closer
> to the brevity of concepts it is normal to write around
> 12 syllables in a short/longer/short style for English
> haiku. 5-7-5 certainly has that very distinct haiku sound
> to it though, and following the rule doesn't hurt. :-)
>
> For some shakuhachi related content, I wonder how many
> of you use shakuhachi for meditation with groups? I had
> the great comment from someone recently that they could
> not meditate until they came to a group where I started
> breath meditation with 5 minutes of shakuhachi, letting
> it fade out into the stillness that then followed. He
> finally recognised what the peace of calmness felt like,
> and now can grasp it at will easily.
>
> I'd love to hear other insights into our instruments of
> bamboo, breath and silence.
>
> Ralf
>
> ____________________________________________________
>
> <a
>
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-- Karl Young kyoung@slac.stanford.edu SLAC M/S 71 PO Box 20450 Stanford, CA 94309 650-926-3380 (voice) 650-926-2923 (FAX) ____________________________________________________
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