What is it about?
The premise is to apply the well-used Shannon Entropy metric to understand how language complexity may relate to the complexity of information in a culture. Shannon Entropy has been used routinely to probe landscape and species diversity in ecological sciences and the same methodology is proposed to analyse the complexity of the language used to describe culture.
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Why is it important?
The methodology is fairly obvious and has shown great potential in understanding biological and geographical complexity - and subsequently allowed geographical complexity to be related to biological complexity. Likewise language is the descriptor of culture and growth on one is mirrored by the language needed to describe and grow it further. Therefore, it seemed a natural leap to apply the same metric to language as a means of probing its cultural landscape. The method had not been used in quite this way, previously, but did relate well to the use of various machine-learning techniques, such as CLOZE methodology in sentence prediction.
Perspectives
The article is the first in, one hopes, a short series of interrelated articles that address how culture evolves in relation to its language and environment. These articles will attempt to apply the language of genetics to that of language/culture in an manner that places information at the center of evolutionary processes, irrespective of their area.
Dr David Sinclair Stevenson
Carlton le Willows Academy
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Application of Shannon Entropy Metrics to Cultural Diversity and Language Evolution, August 2021, Academia.edu,
DOI: 10.20935/al2503.
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